I Don't Want to Barge in on Your Secrecy

 Weird fact of the day:

In high school, I was obsessed with the bands Catch-22 and Streetlight Manifesto, as every teenaged ska fan was. In particular, I was absorbed by the bass playing on Keasbey Nights and Everything Goes Numb and spent hours upon hours practicing the songs to try and get up to the actual speed they were played at (I mostly accomplished that).*

*While I was in my first high school ska band, our trumpet player was weirdly obsessed with playing bass and trying to prove he was better than me. One time, we were talking about Streetlight and I mentioned how hard the bassline to "Everything Went Numb" was (it is very hard and crazy). He shrugged it off and was like "I dunno I just played along to it first try." I didn't really know what to say. No you didn't? It's clearly fast shredding for like four minutes? You definitely don't know how to play that song?

Those two albums featured significant overlap in players and one of them was Josh Ansley playing bass. He offered two drastically different styles on them, fretless sliding on one and frenetic 5-string walking on the other, and he consumed my imagination as a teen. His playing was the gold standard in my mind and accomplishing something similar was my primary goal. For a little bit, meaning until I bought Destruction by Definition, he also definitely got the "idol" label from me.

For more comments on early Streetlight, and a little bit on bass playing, consult my story on seeing Streetlight play the Kathedral in 2005, a revised version of which is in my 2018 zine on ska. ($5! Cheap!)

I tell you this because today I found out that he is now a new age spiritual bro vlogger:

I guess you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain, eh? I realize that the odds of someone else reading this and being as shocked as I am are in the thousandths of a percent range, but this discovery had to get somewhere, right?

Jeeze Tim, you write a post about hating how lean on nostalgia and then churn this shit out.

(•_•)
<) )╯I
/ \

(•_•)
\( (> AM
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(•_•)
<) )╯DUMB
/ \

Okay, now back to reading and listening to Animal Liberation Front hardcore.

Golden Love

I found myself thinking about earnesty in the shower yesterday.

I worry about being too earnest a lot. Whenever I try to do creative writing, I find that I inevitably return to super earnest nostalgia. On some level, I guess that is fine, because earnest narrative non-fiction is what I do and it's what I'm best at. It's good to be good at something, right?

On the other hand, I wish I could do more than that. Every time that I've tried to branch out into different types of writing, it doesn't really work out well. There's even been times where I try really hard to do something new, move into fiction, and it still just ends up being a mess of earnest nostalgia. I want to be more than that, you know? I want to be able to write an actual story out of nothing, rather than just churning out whiteboy feelings.

I think that earnesty is slippery slope for white guys. When you start with it, people applaud you for communicating your feelings, which requires bravery to some degree. That's important, I guess, and I suppose that talking about your feelings works against the shittier parts of masculinity to some degree, but the problem is that if you are earnestly talking about your feelings constantly, and people are constantly praising you for it, you start to believe that your feelings are the most important and you start to take up a lot of space. I don't ever want to be that person.

To illustrate what I'm saying, I don't think there's a better example than whiney pop-punk.

Like, it's not stupid for me to say that's too earnest, right?

Okay, here is a whole mess of mixed up metaphors: There is definitely is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Sugar is great and amazing and helps things taste good and adds to the other flavours when you're cooking, but something being too sweet fuckin' sucks. Earnesty is like that. Maybe that's why people always refer to pop-punk as "sugary".

This all being said, I fucking hate when art kids are ironic to the point of not meaning anything they say, so the other end of the spectrum fuckin' sucks too. It's hard to know what the right amount of earnesty for something is, and I think that depends on the circumstance too. Being earnest about things that have affected you? Seems to be mostly good, from my experience. Being earnest exclusively about how hurt you are by your ex-girlfriend? Mostly dumb.

I, Musical Genius 2020 Music Revue

It feels like I barely got into anything this year, but when I actually stacked all of the stuff I liked together, I was surprised at how quickly I ran out of spots on the list. Is it me actually losing touch, or am I just getting crushed over the complete availability of cool records on the internet? I have no idea. As always, this list is unordered. That shit doesn't matter

Nothing - The Great Dismal

TBH, out of all bands here, I think that Nothing is the one where I'm most sure their record will make the list before hearing it. At this point, I'm not expecting them to change lanes out of melodic shoegaze that's as indebted to power pop as it is grunge, but I pleasantly surprised by this release and enjoyed it more than Dance on the Blacktop. "Catch a Fade" is one of their best songs and seems like a 2020 anthem to me, though I'm not sure why.

Nudie Mag - Our Milk

It's impossible to not check a band called Nudie Mag, right? This band is a Twitching Tongues side project, who I've never listened to. Really great pared-down and synthy power pop that is probably closest to the Rentals. Short and sweet.

field medic - Floral Prince

I actually wasn't aware that field medic, whose fade into the dawn I loved in 2019, was working on a new record, so I was pleased to get this in the summer, even if it is mostly leftovers from that record. This continues with the lofi folk by way of fourth wave emo aesthetic that the earlier stuff has had and I eat it up.

-

We're going to take an aside here to talk about the person who did the most in 2020 by a wide margin, Daniel Romano. Already an insanely prolific musician who was putting out between one and three releases per year, Romano went insane during quarantine and released ELEVEN records between March and November. ELEVEN. 11 different records that were all distinct from each over sonically. Most bands can't do that in an entire career. It felt weird to start this list with him, as I don't think any of his records were the A-1 first thing I thought of this year, but he did dominate my listening for all of the summer and keeping track of and checking out what the new shit was was by far the most fun I had listening to music this year. I spent some time thinking on how to incorporate his work into my list and settled on giving him his own sub section. 

Quick hits on my favourites:

Dandelion: His best work this year, but only the true heads know that. Beautiful and personal and among his best work.

How Ill Thy World is Ordered: The biggest studio effort of all is great and a fitting cap on the year of music from him.

Super Pollen: No Ancient Shapes this year, but similar work with Mike and Jonah from Fucked Up is an A-OK replacement.

Content to Point the Way: His friends asked him for a new county record and it rocks.

(What Could Have Been) Infidels by Bob Dylan & the Plugz: In a year where I was in my deepest Dylan phase ever, getting this was a welcome addition.

Visions of the Higher Dream: Modern Pressure 2: 2 Modern 2 Pressure

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Supercrush - SODO Pop

Honestly, I wasn't expecting a full-length from Supercrush (was Never Let You Drift Away an LP? I've heard both opinions?) to engage me much, but this would up being a lot more catchy and interesting than I thought. A million bands are playing boring 90s Britpop and Supercrush aren't one.

Mil-Spec - World House

I really loved the Background-era Lifetime vibe on Mil-Spec's EPs before this record and they combined that with the Snapcase-ish melodic stuff that Fury has been doing here. Friggin' awesome yo.

Blooming Season - Living Feeling

I discovered Blooming Season at the last show I saw before COVID hit this year. They were tight and super energetic and provided the insane rush of when you see a band live and realize that you love them during their set.

Mundy's Bay - Lonesome Valley

In keeping with bands I discovered at shows in Montreal, I saw Mundy's Bay open for Supercrush in summer '19 and realizing how much more vibrant and different the punk scene was here is directly tied to them. This record captures how great they are live 

blink-155 - Been Here For Too Long

I already wrote about my feelings on the pod here, so I won't rehash that. This comp was made to commemorate the end of blink-155 and features a bunch of people who guested covering "Dammit" by the boys. It ranges from well-known entities (Antartico Vespucci) to my friends (Claire) and it all rocks.

Kill Lincoln - Can't Complain

If I'm being honest, I was a little let down by this release, but it's not fair for me to hold my unreasonable expectations for it against it's actual quality. I've never been shy about banging my "ska is good and all who hate pose" drum and was happy that in the last couple of years (especially those on Kill Lincoln's own Bad Time Records) a new crop of bands has popped up to prove my point. Kill Lincoln is the best of the bunch and this is a great poppy ska-punk release.

Jeff Rosenstock - 2020 Dump

I found that this sort of EP/sort of growing collection of songs vastly better than the Rosenstock full-length No Dream. I love that it's all over the place sonically (as any JR release should be), I love that you need to download it via .zip on QuoteUnquote, and I love that he's finding a new way to work against the music industry and that it is almost somehow the old way he did it.

Classics of Love - World of Burning Hate

I find it hard to be objective about music by Jesse Michaels because all of his bands have been so instrumental to my development as a person. Is it as good as Op Ivy or the Classics of Love full-length? I guess not? I don't care man, I could listen to this for the rest of my life. What a force.

boy pablo - Wachito Rico

boy pablo is one of my favourite discoveries of the last couple of years (in a very 10's world, found through the YoTube algorithm), but their sophomore release really let me down, for no reason at all. They worked past those non-existent criticisms on this first full-length and put out a record that leans more toward songwriting than their past stuff (good!), while still maintaining their weird Norwegian sense of humour.

People Are All the Same

 A comprehensive list of all that have held the "Best Bar in the World" World Title Championship Belt.

Sneaky Dee's

The Toronto youth's first favourite bar. You hear about it from people just older than you and understand that you need to try the nachos. The tables covered in graffiti (latrinaria?) immediately look like something you've seen a million times in movies. You realize that drinking bottled beer in a bar is good. It's the first bar you go to regularly that isn't a Fox and the Fiddle or Firkin and that makes it feel like it's your friends' "place" even though it is everyone's friends' "place".

Jimmy Jazz

Guelph is big enough to have a population of weirdos, punks, hipsters, and art kids (are all of those the same thing?), but small enough that they all convene at the same place. Every person you've seen on campus that seems cool will one day have a conversation with you here. You graduate from bottles of PBR to bottles of Labbatt 50. A bench runs around the perimeter of a backyard patio that is where everyone hangs. The patio is so good that space heaters are installed overhead so that everyone can hangout outside during the winter, which they do.

Abstract

A goth dive bar that simultaneously feels like the intro scene to The Matrix, the Foot Clan hideout in Ninja Turtles, and a small-town watering hole that no one knows about. You discover yet another brand of bottled beer that makes you feel cool to drink in Molson Stock Ale. People watching will never, ever be better in your life. The first time you go, it's ironic, but you truly love it after that. 

Bar Stella

Tiny and dark with two picnic tables outside during the summer. A small menu of Indian food that is surprisingly authentic and hot considering the bar it's served in. Cheap bottles of 50, PBR, and Old Style. A DJ that plays Drake all the time. Never too busy. If you can name a more perfect Toronto bar, then you need to head to the bathroom because you're full of shit. RIP.

Dundas Video

We can all admit that "barcades" are still fun despite the fact that they are little played out. This one sent itself into the stratosphere by playing Raptors games on a projection screen during the playoff run and by accompanying that screen with tall cans of Wellington on special for $5. For a bar that brought people in to watch sports, it somehow had an asshole filter at the door and everyone there was fun and knowledgeable. There has never been a better place to watch basketball than Dundas Video in the spring of 2019.

I'll Bet You Want To

 Is poptimism over?

I mean obviously it is, but I was thinking this earlier while I revisited the albums that I was into during the phase of all snobby music fans getting extremely into major label pop music in the first half of the decade. I gave Teenage Dream, 1989, and weirdly Little Machines by Lights a lot of spins from like 2013-2015, as all of a sudden it seemed like a veil had been lifted from my eyes and I realized that mainstream pop music is actually fun to listen to. It was similar to when you grow up a white rock music fan and realize that you were actually so so wrong about rap music. Poptimism even leaked into other parts of my listening habits, as revisiting those pop albums made me think of West Coast Babes by The Canyon Rays, which I thought was awesome at the time because it merged Katy Perry and the Cars, but in hindsight is a lot closer to average.

Another weird thing was that I actually hadn't seen the music videos for a lot of the songs I was into at the time, because I am a serious white music fan. Watching them today made them seem like they were from 20 years ago, even though it doesn't feel like that long. I guess that 7 or so years is enough time for style to change and everyone to stop rolling up the sleeves on their t-shirts, wearing thick-rimmed glasses, and "cute" animal onesies to go out of style. Also a surprising amount of teased male hair?

In hindsight, I think that Carly Rae Jepsen's E•MO•TION was the crest of this whole thing. Even though I never listened to it, not for any sort of reason, it was catnip for dumb music snobs like me and the narrative of her being known for a dumb single but then putting out a "serious independent album" seemed to drive people, but especially men, crazy. 

Maybe men listening to pop music was the reason the whole thing happened? Taylor Swift and Katy Perry had been around for ages already, but pop was finally good because rock was dead and white guys had nothing else to listen to. Maybe we'll ruin something else next.

What a bad ending! Wow! Don't know bro, I just wanted to write and don't have anything else to say!

Unloading Our Minds

Apologies if you're tired of me speaking about my experience moving to Montreal, but I don't really have much else going on these days.

It might just be my Ontario education bias, but I feel like the conflicting cultures of Ontario and Québec make up a huge part of Canadian history and identity. The differences between living in Ontario and in Québec are basically the only thing you learn about in elementary school history classes, so it's something I've thought a lot about since moving here.

There are obvious big differences that go without saying, like the language and not turning right on red lights, so we can skip over those. The biggest cultural difference, as far as I can tell, is that Ontarians deeply love rules and precautions and rarely deviate from them, whereas the Québécois tend to just do whatever and hope it works and ignore rules that they don't feel like following. Both tendencies have their advantages and drawbacks and I'm a little torn between the two as a bilingual anglo who lives in Hochelaga.

The weirdest thing about living here now is that differencing coming out in small ways too. I'm being hyperbolic, but the thing that sums up Québec the best to me is that at the grocery store everyone just leaves the carts unchained and doesn't link them up so that you need a quarter to use them. The lock is still there on the cart, but nobody ever uses it. In Ontario everyone is so anal about people breaking the rules that I've seen people link carts together even it's not theirs, but here everyone just says "No, I refuse this.'

Alright, time for a classic IMU swerve in the middle of a post to another subject. We're po-mo baby.

One of the weirdest things continues to be that the ska-punk band I was obsessed with in early high school turned into one of the biggest and most influential figures in punk over the last decade. I was reminded of this when I searched for Jeff Rosenstock guitar tabs on good old UltimateGuitar.com the other day and found multiple pages of options. Not even Bomb the Music Industry!, just solo Jeff! That in turn reminded me of writing bass tabs of Arrogant Sons of Bitches songs in high school and my submissions making up the majority of the content on their page. They're still there!

Anyways, Jeff Rosenstock put out an EP (I guess?) this year and I find it to be much better than his last couple of albums. It was initially four songs, but he's since added two more and it seems like it will be a collection of songs that grows bigger throughout the year. He's also kept it off of streaming services, so the only way to listen is to use Bandcamp or, as always, download it as a .zip file for free from his website. I think that him purposefully recreating the experience of me downloading Goodbye Cool World and then reading the lyrics in my bedroom is a big contributing factor to me liking it, but I also find that the songs feel more like "classic Jeff" to me, even though I can't really place why.

This is my favourite song on the release, and looking up a bass tab to it was why I ran into the above thoughts in the first place. There wasn't one yet, obviously, and I couldn't learn it by ear because I'm tone-deaf. Such is life.

Tour Water

An embarrassing thing about me is that I went to more editions of the Vans Warped Tour than pretty much everyone I know. I wish I could say that I stopped going once I left high school, but it turned into a weird thing that I kept doing long after that. Here is a list of each time I went, described through the short memories that I have tied to each time.

I
Putting a lot of thought into what shirt to wear and choosing Black Flag. The Casualties being scary. Deville being the best band in the world. Caring so much about seeing Bad Religion.

II
Investing all of my happiness in seeing Big D and the Kids Table play "Little Bitch" and asking them to do so before the set. The only time I saw The Offspring and Dropkick Murphys.

III
Being absolutely over the moon to finally see NOFX. Sheepishly going to buy an Aiden shirt as a fully dekked-out teen ska boy for a girl I liked. Less Than Jake ending the day and being the best band by a mile.

IV
The crew shrinking to just Chris, Pat and I. Gallows hype being at its height. Spending the entire day at the Union Stage watching Ontario ska bands. Being so confused that everyone loved All Time Low.

V
Switching to Arrow Hall in Mississauga instead of driving up to Barrie. Easycore ascending and Set Your Goals, Four Year Strong and A Day to Remember all playing being a "thing". 

VI
Crabcore being so big and obnoxious and bad. Pennywise playing in the rain. Streetlight Manifesto ending their set by saying "Steal our record because fuck our record label". Having nothing to do and trying to give watching A Day to Remember a shot. Them sucking, and leaving to watch Shad by myself.

VII
Starting to get really over going to Warped Tour and being annoyed at the crowd. A guy in line saying "Wouldn't it be crazy if the Chili Peppers came out and played 'Can't Stop'?" Sum 41 putting a really embarrassing easycore breakdown in "Fat Lip". The aftershow by Polar Bear Club at the Bovine being so much better.

VIII
Buying a ticket and thinking "I don't care how much it sucks, I know it will be bad, I'm only coming to see Less Than Jake and it won't be sod bad if I know that going in" and then it being so much worse.

It Means Nothing, Nothing is Changing

 Today (I started writing this on Friday and am now finishing it on Saturday) marked the tend of the podcast blink-155 and I have to admit that I didn't expect myself to get as emotional as I did. This was yet another example of me repeating to myself that something is "just a podcast" or "just a TV show" and for that reason, doesn't carry the emotional heft that real life event does. I was a fan of the show from day 1 and never missed a week of listening, but I wasn't actively engaged in the crazy Twitter community that formed around it and I didn't join the livestreams on Twitch. It was just something I liked, at least until the last episode started and I found myself getting wistful immediately.

blink-155 (yes, their name is subject to the same formatting principles as blink-182) was a good podcast because it was not like any other podcast I have listened to. It wasn't finely produced with interstitial music and heavily edited dialogue, and in fact they often mocked this through the format. It was long and meandering and it was about a lot of things, like media criticism, identity, aging, and evaluating online pop culture, while also managing to be about the band blink-182 most of the time. I think it's silly for me to try to explain the importance of the show any further because I'm underqualified, but I guess just know that it was really funny, endearing, smart, and unique.

I don't know that I can place my relationship to show alongside any other changes in my life (except for moving to Montreal and not knowing people here), so it's a little tough to think of exactly why the show hit the way it did, with my intense interest in the band it was about notwithstanding. Regardless, here's an attempt to do that:

As you aged as a blink fan, the band became this embarrassing from your past that you still carried with you. They were so big that everyone you knew had a frame of reference for them, but knew them as that juvenile fake punk band that everyone in class liked in 2001, rather than the identity-defining thing that you still loved. It was okay to pass off that love when you were 21, but with each passing year, it became less and less okay to still like them so much. Nobody would judge you to your face for it, but you could tell that everyone was taken aback by how much you knew about the members and how you clearly still kept tabs on what was going on with the band. The band wouldn't help your cause either, of course, as they either put out embarrassing radio rock or even more embarrassing attempts to reclaim their Southern California punk credibility in "return to form albums". To pile onto their awful later albums, they would also do sponsorship deals with Doritos and T-Mobile and all have terrible haircuts that signaled just how desperate they were. Then you would go see them, even though you knew that it wouldn't be as good as watching the "What's My Age Again?" video on your family's TV in the basement. They were play badly, as they always do, and it would seem embarrassing instead of charming, because they were almost 40, instead in their mid-20s. The new songs would always suck and you would be surrounded by bros and normies who wouldn't be friends with you while you were in high school, and they would all go crazy for the flying drum solo Travis did to dubstep. You would think about how much money you spent on tickets and how it wasn't really worth it. Then, Tom would start the distorted intro riff to "Dammit" and the band would play it insanely fast as their last song and you would remember exactly why you liked the band and it would feel like they were playing the song directly to you and you would remember that blink-182 was actually a gateway to lots of cooler things for you and that they are fun and they made you feel cool. Somehow blink-155, and especially the last episode, captured that feeling exactly.

Get My Money, I Don't Give a Fuck What You Say

 When I lived in Toronto, the main thing that I worried about was being 'present'. While working at the art gallery and trying to maintain a schedule of writing, this seemed like an important practice to work into my life that would make me appreciative of the good things around me and help me understand the world. I guess that being present is still important, but it's something that I never think about anymore.

It's hard to prioritize that now. Before COVID hit it was already hard to live in Montreal, as we were far away from friends and family and it tough to deal with our social circle shrinking so fast. Rebecca and I were doing a good job of building up a new network of people in Quebec, but then that was taken out from under us as soon as it was starting to gain momentum.

COVID was easy to deal with at first because it was new. Everyone was experiencing it for the first time and people were supportive and flexible. Now it's gotten old and everyone is settling into a routine around this dumb fucking pandemic, so all the shitty parts of the world are returning in a worse form now that we need to navigate both them and a global virus. Watching TV and staying inside all day was a fun change of pace for me in March, but even I, who loves TV more than almost everything, is willing to admit that this shit has gotten old.

I guess that I'm fortunate to have my thesis to focus on during this, or at least that is the way I'm trying to frame it to have a more positive mindset. On one hand, working through a crucial point of grad school from my office in the back of the apartment and over Zoom has been... weird and I wish that I was able to go to campus and the library and my coffee shop and the fine arts student lounge, but on the other I am genuinely thankful that I have a huge project that I can always work on. It's also comforting to know that if people ask what I've been doing during this pandemic, I can say "my thesis" as an easy answer.

I think what sums up this spring/summer/fall the best is that I've never been closer to picking up smoking in my life. That seems like it would be so nice right now.

Anecdotes! Anecdotes! pt. 155

One of my favourite jokes with Rebecca is me doing something strange and then describing it as "random" as a lampooning of 2000's teen/Myspace lingo, when everyone described everything as "random". But if I'm making fun of that use of the word, am I also allowed to have a series on I, Musical Genius called "Random Anecdotes"? I would say no.

Fortunately, we are sharks, not sheep here at I, Musical Genius and we never stop swimming forward in our blogging venture, so we are pivoting and re-branding "Random Anecdotes" as "Anecdotes! Anecdotes!". I need to have some sort of series where I dump small memories that stick in my brain Larry David-style, because a future without that, in addition to everything else that has happened in 2020, seems too dark.

During my first week of classes in my first year of university a few of the new people I had just met and I went to the University Centre cafe to get lunch before we went to our afternoon classes. I definitely ended up getting Taco Bell. While we were there everyone talked about getting Booster Juice because there was one near the exit and I mentioned that I didn't know what it was. They were flabbergasted and insisted that I get one right away and that it would blow my mind and make me feel like I had mainlined vitamins and nutrients. I got one and thought that it was fine and tasted like a regular smoothie. Every time that I see the restaurant (juice bar? kiosk?) I always think of the disappointment of realizing that all of those people were way too excited about a $10 smoothie in a foam cup.

Hey Fuck You, Fuck You Too

Something you may not know about me is that I am secretly a petty and dramatic person. I love to talk shit; it is so fun and great. I also hold grudges much more than I let on.

In addition to all of that, I have strong opinions on music, seeing as I am a straight white man who weighs under 150 lbs. Though I try to expand my music tastes, discover new things, and re-visit things I used to hate to see if anything has changed, there are some bands that I will just never like because if I've come this far in hating them, I can't just roll back on that and admit they might be good.

The Bands I Will Never Like:

The Beatles

The Beatles are #1 with a bullet. Fuck this band. I deeply love power pop, so people are always like "You would like the early stuff" but the early stuff is either 60% of a good song or Motown covers that are worse than the original. John Lennon has a nine inch nail stuck in his head vibe. Paul is good at bass but sucks. Worst of all is that everyone says they are the best band of all-time, a true sign that they are a band for jabronis.

Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin is the worse version of every good band from the 70s. Less heavy than Sabbath. Rock less than Thin Lizzy. Worse solos than Cheap Trick. Less groovy than the Stones.

Nirvana

I actually liked Nirvana a lot when I first started listening to rock music. Since then I've come to find the hardcore/metal riffs with throaty crooning so obnoxious. I always get this idea of Nirvana being really heavy and thrashy for a mainstream rock band, but then they're always the same boring butt rock whenever I try.

Why?

One of my ex-girlfriends always put down my taste in music and was always trying to change what I listened to by giving me terrible recommendations. She loved the band Why? and for that reason I will never even consider listening to them.

50 Cent

Unfortunately, I was a "rap is crap" kid growing up and 50 Cent got the worst of it. I've gotten into lots of different types of rap since then, but G-Unit stuff still sounds so shitty to me.

Meet Me at the Turnstile

 What do you think about dreams?

I think about the dreams I have a fair amount. It's one of my more hippie-ish qualities. I think that I used to be a more vivid dreamer than I currently am. I would wake up and the feelings of what I had just experienced would be so real. I knew that what happened wasn't real, but there would be about 10 minutes where my body still believed it was. Crazy and intense feelings that felt lived in. That led to me learning a bit about lucid dreaming, which I thought would be an amazing skill to master.

One of the things recommended to get better at lucid dreaming was to keep a dream journal, which I guess helps you to realize the things that recur in your dreams. That worked a bit, and I've lucid dreamed (dreamed lucidly?) a few times, but it's never been something that I've really worked at or something that I coveted. A result of this though, is that I've kept a dream journal, with varying degrees of upkeep, since my early twenties. I started this journal with the goal of working towards lucid dreaming, but what I found much more rewarding about it was being able to revisit dreams I've had and getting, what seems to me to be, a window into my subconscious.

I took an intro psych class in my undergrad and I didn't retain all that much from it. The two things I do remember was my weird hippie teacher explaining Pavlov with a story about béarnaise sauce (and that he said it as sauce béarnaise) and a tutorial discussion about dream interpretation. The TA explained that ultimately dreams don't really mean anything and you can't draw any serious conclusions from them. At first that didn't make sense to me, as to me my dreams felt significant, but in hindsight I understand what she was saying. You can't draw any serious conclusions about a person or their situation from the content of their dreams. If someone was a suspect in a murder case and confessed to having a dream about being guilt-ridden and hiding a secret, it wouldn't mean shit. It would be suspicious, but it wouldn't mean anything concrete in regards to the case.

I still find them interesting to myself though. I find that small occurrences or worries tend to show up in a central way in my dreams. In that way, what happens in my dreams does two things. 1. It helps me to see what I'm worried or anxious about, because that tends to pop up regularly. 2. It can be reassuring to see events from my life re-happen in the dream.

I don't really speak with people about dreams, at least aside from Rebecca sometimes, but I think it's a nice idiosyncrasy of mine that helps in making my personality unique, even if I don't share that with other people. My interest in my own dreams, which I guess is an interest in introspection and self-awareness, has to bleed over into other parts of my personality and existence, right?

Duff recommended Horses by Patti Smith this week. It's great.

That's Rad Yo, She's Gonna Get Naked

Note: I wrote the following this afternoon so that I would be sure to finish the blog later, before going outside and enjoying a bike in warm Montreal:

"I think that it is safe to say that summer 2020 is now over. Temperatures in the mid teens have set in in Montreal and it seems unlikely that they'll leave for more than a day."

Still rings true! Today was like the good episodes from the later seasons of Cheers. With the chill autumn weather and the start of the school year coming in, every day feels the same and too filled with things that distract me from what I need to do. Then a warm day blows through and it feels just like when Woody perfectly sets up a opening joke about Norm drinking too much and you're reminded that there is beauty in the world.

Weird paragraph, right? Cold fall weather : warm fall day :: generic later Cheers episodes : good later Cheers episodes.

It's been strange to think about what this summer has been like, now that it's over. Everyone has been repeating the same thing over and over since the pandemic started, but I guess I have to lean on that too and say that it was a summer unlike any other I've had in my life. What I was doing every day didn't change that much in the grand scheme of things, but the pandemic limiting where we can and what we can do did end up taking a toll by September. No eating out, no drinks at bars, no shows, no baseball games, no seeing friends.

Those are a lot of my favourite things.

Still, I guess it's important to try and maintain some levity in the face of this insane virus and that world it has brought with it, so here are the things I appreciated about Coronavirus Summer 2020.

Even though we couldn't "go out" the way we normally did, it was nice to see friends in the park. Let's all look at the sky and think about how nice it is to sit with friends and have a cold one.

I learned to ride a bike. It's nice to ride your bike through Montreal, especially at 5 PM.

This summer, I skated more than I have in like 6 years. Popping off a good ollie still feels amazing.

The NBA season was pushed back, so teams ended up playing early in the afternoon on summer weekdays. I wish that's when all sports happened.

Frig off virus. Getting pretty tired of this shit already.

There's Only One Hubba

 Yesterday I started to watch an episode of the skateboarding podcast The Nine Club, before realizing that if I was going to watch TV focused telling the stories of skateboarders, and casting YouTube videos does seem to count as TV now, that I should just watch Epicly Later'd, the pinnacle of the form, rather than a sometimes boring meandering conversation taped in a studio.

I watched the multi-part edition of the show on Guy Mariano, focused on him conquering an intense drug problem and re-emerging as one of history's all-time great street skaters with the release of Fully Flared, and that promptly went into another episode of the show as soon as it ended, since I've been watching them in a huge YouTube playlist.

The thing is, every skateboarder knows Guy Mariano. He's headlined several landmark videos, Video Days, Fully Flared, Pretty Sweet, and is up there as one of the strongest influence on tech street skating that exists today (how Guy still manages to do tech with an extreme amount of style is a topic for another time). After his series on Epicly Later'd ended, the autoplay led me to watch one on someone who I had never heard of before, James Kelch.

I find that these episodes, which tell the stories of skaters who fell through the cracks and weren't in the limelight, are often my favourite ones. It's fun to get the stories of the people you know, of course I want to hear Eric Koston's lifestory, but really those episodes just serve to fill in the areas in between what you've already seen. With episodes like this one on Kelch, Epicly Later'd gives you a much fuller picture of the world of skateboarding. There's so many small moments in this that equally hilarious, due to Kelch's natural charisma, and heartbreaking. We learn about what happens around the pros. 

Much like the rest of the world, everything in skateboarding isn't ideal. For every Nyjah making tonnes of money from Street League and Nike, there are those who could never make it happen, despite devoting themselves to it fully. They were still in the right place at the right time, but it didn't matter. Of course, those stories still deserve to be told.

Random Anecdote, Part XXIII

 Last year I was at a house show and some friends and I were hanging out with others we didn’t really know in the kitchen before the bands started. The house had bought  two boxes of Halloween chips for everyone to snack on and we picked out one of each flavour and laid them out on the table. We made a game in which we got each person in the kitchen to rank each flavour of chips. 

Sidenote: Somehow everyone seemed to pick either Salt and Vinegar or Ketchup as their top flavours. What the fuck is wrong with people???

One member of the crowd resisted the game in favour of bragging about being vegan. We then started to draw things on the whiteboard in the kitchen. We encouraged this person to draw something to which they replied "I only know how to draw eyebrows," before proceeding to draw that eyebrow shape on the board.

My friend then came out, saw the whiteboard, and drew an oval around the eyebrow, forming the face of the Pringles man. I don't think many other people noticed, but I really enjoyed knowing that this person draws the Pringles man mustache on their face every day. 

This is a Land of Riches

One of the most enjoyable parts of COVID quarantine has been delving into shitty reality TV with Rebecca. Watching people be cringey and do embarrassing things in the hopes of fame is something the two of us love to share.

Reality TV is now undoubtedly the most popular guilty pleasure when it comes to TV right?The schadenfreude you get when a reality show hits the perfect mix of over the top fake drama, top 40 music, and stupidity is now so specific that I think it needs its own long German word.  Wirklichkeitschadenfreude? I tried.

Netflix has recently started to develop its own MTV and Bachelor-style reality shows, after making many "prestige" ones like cooking travel shows, and it has been just glorious. They're never very good for very long (is any reality show?), but they scratch such a specific itch (see above aside) and it's so easy to indulge in them. Since the start of this year, our favourites have been The Circle, Love is Blind, and Too Hot to Handle. All have their faults, and could be so much better with minor tweaks, but who am I to complain?

A funny thing we've noticed in all these shows is a subtle addition of Christianity to all of them. It's never a main plot point or overtly present, but each show has had characters who are Christian and speak about it in more episodes than they don't. It surprised me because I'm not used to getting God in my trashy TV, though that could be because I mostly limited myself to The Challenge and, of course, Jersey Shore, in my youth.

Something else I like to think about though is how Netflix uses its user viewing data in its content creation. It's famous for doing this, as shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black were both written in ways to exploit viewers' watching habits. If you put a twist here and a happy episode here, someone is more likely to keep watching and get more eyes on your stuff. Keeping this in mind, I tend to consider this when it comes to most Netflix content, especially stuff meant for a wider audience like Love is Blind. 

So, does the steady does of Christian characters in Netflix reality shows mean that they think about attracting a Christian demographic? Is there a Christian lobby pushing for good, God-loving characters on The Circle? IS NETFLIX COMING FOR THAT YESTV/PUREFLIX MONEY?

Even on the recent Wipeout clone that Netflix put out, Floor is Lava, there was a team made up of a pastor and two of his employees (they were by far the biggest weirdos). I keep looking online to see if anyone else has noticed this, but it seems like no one else has really cared besides me.

Fortunately, there is one bastion of reality shows on Netflix untouched by the Bible, and that is the incredible phenomenon of Australian people doing home renovation, rating each other's Air BnBs, and getting back into the dating scene after getting divorced.

Random Anecdote Pt. 12

I was thinking about the shelf life of fads recently and before long, the king fad of them all, Pokemon Cards, came to mind. Whenever I'm reminded of them, I immediately think of one memory related to them.

Opening Scene:

A small portable in a school yard. It's a fall morning, but it hasn't gotten chill outside yet. Pokemon is at the height of its popularity. Though it has captured the imaginations of North American children everywhere, this only means that a precipitous drop in interest will be coming soon.

"Good morning students."

The principal begins to run through the morning's announcements after the national anthem. After giving some news about the school's Jog-A-Thon fundraiser, he pauses.

"Now, on the subject of Pokemon cards. Starting tomorrow, no Pokemon cards will be allowed on school grounds. This includes recess."

Our protagonist Tim turns in his seat to see his classmate Tyler dropping his head into his hands in anguish, a 2" binder full of Pokemon cards open on his desk.

There aren't any other scenes!

That moment really sums up the experience of every fad (Crazy Bones, yo-yos, Pogs) to me. Though Pokemon as a franchise has persisted longer than I'm sure any North American parent saw coming, the cards came and went pretty fast. Pokemon cards were such an intense thing while they were here and an economy developed around them among kids so fast. Every kid knew they wanted a Charizard (I was sadly only able to muster a Chansey) and was on a quest to trade up for it. It's funny for me to think of Tyler dying inside in real time in front of me because he couldn't bring his giant binder to school anymore, but there was genuine sadness there too, as misguided as it may have been.

What's also funny though is that I don't think many kids actually knew how to play the card game. We all created our own versions of how to play based on looking at the numbers on the cards, but the rules were too complicated for our dumb asses to understand. I only realized how the game worked years later when I played the GameBoy edition of the trading card game. We were so caught up in how badly we needed to own Pokemon cards, but none of their worth was based in us actually using them,* only in having them.

*Is Charizard actually the best card?

Fads meet at the most volatile crossroads of kids needing to fit in and parents having to be withholding because they know better. Your parents realize how stupid the thing you're obsessed with is and as a result need to dole it out in small doses. Sure, you could receive pack upon pack of Pokemon cards, like Tyler did, but then you start to expect everything you want and don't appreciate everything you have. And yeah, the fad your kid is obsessed is stupid, but if you don't give them a little taste, they're ostracized by their peers and being consistently put out like that can create some very real issues later.

Kids like such dumb shit. How will they ever survive?

Tryin' to Lose the Awkward Teenage Blues

Coincidences have to be one of the weirdest things about our human existence, right? You see a few things recur over a couple of weeks and it's easy to convince yourself that we're living in a simulation and are just pawns being manipulated by an unseen power. You can even convince yourself that a worldwide pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people isn't real.

This is on my mind because of two musical artists that seem to be circling me lately.

Coincidence band #1: Screeching Weasel

I used to love Screeching Weasel when I was younger. I  was really into learning the history of pop-punk at the time and being into My Brain Hurts made me feel like I was a bigger head than all of my peers listening to All Time Low. To be honest, the songs are still very good, but the "I hit women and SJWs are unfair" act that Ben Weasel has going on is a quick path to me not giving a shit about your band.

Sidenote: One day it rained at Ontario Place and the entire water park staff jammed into our break room to escape the storm. One person asked for an iPod to put on music and ended up using mine. They asked "What should I put on?" and I replied "I don't know, everyone probably won't like the music that's on there." Everyone teased me for being pretentious and then put the iPod on shuffle. The first song that played was "My Brain Hurts" and everyone made a disgusted face. I laughed.

So, how has Screeching Weasel turned up for me lately? My friend John started a vintage streetwear shop. Or page? Or account? I don't know how being a hypebeast works. Anyways, he recently did an unboxing video and one of the shirts he featured was a vintage Boogadaboogdaboogada shirt.

Then, when I woke up this morning I did my usual routine of downloading the most recent episode of Blink-155 so that I could listen to it while I took Pierre on his morning walk. This morning's episode? blink-182's cover of "The Girl Next Door".

Coincidence Band #2: Bob Seger

A couple of weeks ago, I watched Girl and Chocolate's 2014 skate video Pretty Sweet. Given how ubiquitous those companies (company?) have been in skating, the video is stacked and their team is pretty much unparalleled in terms of talent. The part that stands out the most to me in the video, for whatever reason, is Cory Kennedy's, which is accompanied by Seger's "Night Moves".

Whereas most of the video featured hip-hop or hardcore punk, Kennedy's super laidback and Pacific Northwest style of skating works absolutely perfectly with the long acoustic-driven song.

Man, what a part. Jeeze.

Yesterday my friend Matt tweeted "he died as lived, listening to Bob Seger's 'Night Moves' on repeat". That is ... the ultimate way to go. This coincidence makes a lot of sense, as Matt and I are essentially two version of the same person and have identical interests, so it's not a stretch that he would be pumping the Silver Bullet Band and I would be excited about him pumping the Silver Bullet Band.

THEN, Seger came back again. Rebecca and I have been watching the first season of The OC, a much-loved show that I have never watched. One of the characters on the show, Julie Cooper, is a women who came from a poor neighbourhood, but married a then-rich man and is now ashamed of her past and overcompensates with a rich lifestyle. Early in the season, one character refers to her past self as someone who loved Bob Seger, which is supposed to be signifier of her lower class background and taste and is seemingly unbelievable in the rich confines of Newport Harbor. Cooper then begins an affair with her daughter's ex-boyfriend, but ultimately spurns him in favour of accepting a marriage to the father of her neighbour, who cheated with her husband. This show is so stupid and it is very funny to me that Days of Our Lives in a different time slot was such a definitive show and identity-shaping moment for many people I know.

Anyway, the song that plays after Luke sees Julie say "yes" and drives away drunk? Take a guess.

The First Word that They Learned was Please

Now with an update on this week's Giant Brain Album Exchange Album of the Week, Mean Gene Okerlund!

This choice by Duff was unique because Sinéad O'Connor's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got is actually a record that I've tried to get into in the past, but ultimately gave up on. Even though I have a history with the record, it had been almost a decade since I had given it a listen, so our exchange was a good excuse for me to revisit it.

Deep down, I want to like Sinéad O'Connor because I think she's extremely cool. Like most, my knowledge of her came from the two most obvious places: Her cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U" on I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got and her ripping a picture of Pope John Paul II (JP2, for all of my Catholics in the know) on Saturday Night Live. I always thought the former was so badass and it's something that I've grown to respect even more with time. The Catholic Church's history of child abuse is firmly planted in mainstream discussions of the religion now, but not so much in 1992 (or 3, I didn't fact check #jschool).



I feel like so much of my relationship to older pop music was shaped by watching MuchMoreMusic while I was in elementary and high school. In addition to videoflows of music from the 80s and 90s, they would show tonnes of VH1 music documentaries, which would contextualize the bands I saw. Watching those shows was absolutely how I learned about Sinéad O'Connor and is also why I tend to only think of her in terms of her biggest crossover hit and her most infamous moment in the public eye. Not enough time in a superficial music documentary to really dig in, you know?

I deeply loved "Nothing Compares 2U" after going through my first breakup in university. In fact, me listening to the song on repeat in my tiny basement room in my shitty student house is probably the most melodramatic cliche thing I've ever done. Even so, every time I hear the song it takes me back to that time and I remember deeply the song resonated with me. For the entire duration of it, I felt present and it felt like I was being heard. That seems silly to say, considering I was 19 and didn't know anything about life or love yet, but I'm a silly person.

Of course, since I was 19 years old and still invested in skate punk, this version also got a lot of play:


At this point in my life, I'm willing to hear out claims on Me First and the Gimme Gimmes being much better than NoFX.

After revisiting the album, my opinion was more or less the same as the first time. I think that I appreciated it more this time, but it ends up being a little too all over the map for me. I wish the percussion on "I Am Stretched on Your Grave" was on every song. It feels like it's getting close to an interesting mix of Britpop, 80s dance, and folk singing sometimes, but then just when I get comfortable it veers into something else. Really, I want to like the album more than I actually do. I wish it was a cohesive thing that ties together all my expectations, but that's just not the case.

Maybe she has other ones that will do that? Probably not. Is it bad to limit my appreciation of Sinéad to her canonical moments? As much as I do want to steer out of the dumb a limited Western canon of rock and pop music, in this instance I tried and came back with the same answer. This reminds me of this scene from Lady Bird, which has stuck with me since I saw the movie and I think of all the time.

I Want to Taste the Salt of Your Skin

I'm wearing a vintage Kenny Rogers t-shirt today that my brother got me for Christmas in 2018 and it got me thinking about wearing the shirts of bands that you don't listen to, which has persisted as a hot-button issue in rock subcultures since merch really started to take off.

Not actually my shirt, but that is the one I currently have on.

Seeing somebody who more than likely doesn't listen to a band wearing a band's shirt and trying to needle them about their choice of shirt is something that the most basic rock bro loves to do. Case in point:



I guess that because you have devoted so much of your life to learning minutiae about a specific type of music, it feels good to identify and out somebody who is, in your estimation, a poseur. That will certainly make you feel big, but it also reflects more deeply ingrained gender dynamics in music, as especially rock music. How many of the people that he does it to in the above video are women? Does he gravitate to women rather than men because he assumes that most men will know? How many of those women were just panicking because they were put on the spot?

Being asked about the t-shirt that you're wearing is something that Rebecca has always worried about and that I had a hard time relating to. Becks hated talking about music and movies and their feelings about those things because there was such a history of men not believing their feelings were genuine. I couldn't believe that "Oh you like this band, name 5 songs" was a real thing, but obviously it happens all the time.

Who fucking cares what someone is wearing? Most male rock music fans are the type of losers who put any woman that listens to the same music as them on a unattainable pedestal anyways, so why are you purposefully trying to drive them away from that?

How that relates to my current shirt though is that the current fad of wearing vintage shirts is basically entirely built on wearing the shirts of bands you don't like.

Sidenote: Today, we were listening to Third Eye Blind's Self-Titled while driving. I wondered what type of merch 3EB has right now (it's all bad) and that led to me looking for their shirts on Etsy, where their 90s merch was going for hundreds of dollars.

A prime example of this is me right now. I don't really care about Kenny Rogers at all. "The Gambler" is a great classic rock staple and the MadTV skit was pretty funny, but other than that I have no tie to his music whatever. I like wearing the shirt because of commodity fetishism and because I love the aesthetic of old rock shirts. I can put on this t-shirt and because it's Kenny Rogers and it has the sewn-on stripes on the sleeves, it makes me look like Kelso.

Though at one time a celebrity wearing the logos of bands they clearly didn't listen to was grounds to roast them online, somewhere in the last 15 years the rock side of that argument lost so soundly that no one even noticed at all. Anyone bringing up that sort of argumentation now sounds like Abe Simpson in a bad way,* and we can see that reflected in current style.

*I find that "Ok boomer" got so tired after like a day. I get extreme chills of embarrassment every time someone uses it now.

Now, when someone wears a vintage t-shirt, like let's say an Instagram influencer wearing a Judas Priest shirt or something, it's about them acknowledging the spot that Judas Priest once occupied in music and pop culture discourse, rather than voicing your opinion of their music. What you're really saying by wearing your vintage shirt is "I know that heavy metal used to be dangerous and edgy and I like the aesthetic of the band". It's a post-modern way of interacting with popular culture, because we are now bringing the discourse and culture surrounding an idea or a band into our fashion choices, adding an extra, critical step in the choice beyond "I like the band, so I'm wearing the t-shirt", which I also still do.

I guess it's similar to other fashion trends coming back around again, like acid-washed jeans and hippie skirts, where a young person wearing them is doing so because the idea that it used to be cool is now cool enough to display that you know that.

More like Closed-Eye

One of the most fruitful friendships that I've formed in my life has been with Duff, who I'm certain I've mentioned on here before. Duff and I met through going to punk shows in Ontario with mutual friends. We weren't nearly as close as we eventually became then, mostly because I was deep into my party phase and Duff was nailed to the X.

Note: Duff is my only friend who remained edge. Kudos to him.

We became much closer after I joined Beat Noir and we realized that we had much more in common than we initially thought. We both loved reading, both loved keeping up with #peakTV, had similar politics, and actually both loved a lot of the same music (neither of us would have guessed the last bit). We talk pretty much every day and have had a running conversation for I don't know how many years.

A quick aside: Duff used to work in Guelph and would give me a lift home from campus on Fridays. We would have really funny conversations on the ride home and I joked about starting a podcast that was just a recording of us talking shit during this drive. We obviously never did, but this is the only good podcast idea I have ever had and it is the only one I will ever consider actually doing.

At the start of quarantine, Duff came up with the idea that we would give the other an album they hadn't heard to listen to during that week and we then established these rules.

The listener must:

1) listen to the album from start to finish in one sitting
2) consult all notes given by the recommender while listening
3) read the relevant Wikipedia pages for the album

After that we reconvene and talk about what we thought. It's been a nice thing to do each week and has made me revisit my own collection of music more critically, rather than just living on my Spotify homepage and the playlist of things that came out this year. Both of us have had hits (Duff showing me a late-60s Kinks record and me showing him Thin Lizzy's Fighting) and both of us have tortured the other person a little bit too (Duff listening to the Raspberries and me listening to Faust).

Today I was worn out from a bike ride downtown to get a COVID test. Turns out that going right from learning to riding into the city is stressful. When I got home, I was in a bad mood, but something that helped mitigate that was checking out Duff's recommendation for the week, the Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas.

Duff described them as UK post-punk's most ethereal band and that tracks. I had actually checked out an earlier release of theirs a couple of weeks ago, but for whatever reason that album didn't stick with me at all. This one was instead a dreamy, immersive way to escape the frustrated feelings that I was stewing in. For a moment, I thought it might be too adult contemporary for me, but that was only a passing feeling. This is what bad adult contemporary thinks it sounds like. Layers upon layers of vocals and effects that can take you away to another place for a little bit.

Before you thinking that I'm getting all highbrow pop critic on you though, I then turned to a Japanese ska-punk release I recently discovered and learned a bass tapping pattern.

And Consequently He Also Saved the Piña Colada Industry

I've never been a "bike guy" let alone a bike punk. This subculture has really flourished over the last decade or so and was something that I totally wiffed on because I didn't even learn how to ride a bike until last month. Once I learned, a friend graciously gave a bike to me, I rode it a bunch, went and got it all set up at a shop and now I guess I am a bike punk. I even have the rolled-up khaki shorts to go with it!

I must admit that a small part of me feels guilty that the bike will now take the place of my skateboard as my primary way of getting around. The divide between skaters and bikers isn't as strong as the former and rollerbladers, but I feel like it's still there to some degree. Is it possible to exist in both camps? I feel like yes, but this will be a new thing for me to navigate in the future.

While riding my bike to the bike this morning, the experience made me think of an anecdote that Dan Campbell told about the experience of writing The Upsides in which a formative moment for him happened while he was riding his bike through the city. Those sorts of bits of information always stick to me like Krazy Glue.

It made me reflect on that album and how singular my relationship is to it. I had such an obsessive draw to it after it came out and built it all into my personality so heavily. I had an "I'm not sad anymore" sign in my bedroom, had "I'm not sad anymore" written on my backpack, and had (still have) the "I'm not sad anymore" hoodie.

Note: I wonder constantly if this is the most valuable piece of merch I own. I was shocked when I looked at my discogs and discovered that my 1st pressing of The Upsides was my most valuable record by a landslide.

After that I never really got into the band's later stuff as much, though Surburbia did get some plays, and I quickly moved on from my interest in that sort of pop-punk. When I look back at the record now, I find the music, lyrics, and general message insanely corny, but I also have a deeply embedded nostalgic relationship with it that I can still fuck with it on some level. I think about how much I would make fun of a nasally pop-punk that centered a message of positivity above all else if they came out now. I think about how some of the jokey pop-culture reference aged like milk. I think about how truly embarrassed I am of some of the other stuff I liked at that time (I will never live down Four Year Strong).

It all makes for a strange relationship to the band in which I recognize that they are critically not very good and unbelievably corny in terms of punk and that I have to own that, but also that I have a real, emotional connection to the music and it did do very real, tangible things for me. Just look at this blog in 2010 for fuck sakes.

Maybe going through your posi phase is a necessary thing to do as a young person. I like to think that it taught me important lessons about keeping a level head and always looking for more perspective on things. I think it was also a way for me to ignore the world for a little bit in self-interest and only think about my own minuscule problems, which sucks.

All that said, this song is my favourite on the album and still bangs, so we can end on that.

 

I'll Sleep Away the Summer to Be with You

Something comforting about living in Montreal is that the summers have the same sort of riverbed humid heat that I would experience in Toronto. I look forward to that heat all year and its sort of comforting that the same heat comes to visit me here.

My love of humid heat is contentious with most people I meet. Everyone hates summer because during winter you can always add more layers if you need to warm up, but in summer you just have to be hot. Everyone hates summer because they sweat and it makes them uncomfortable.

It's not like these are actual arguments or this is something that really bothers me, it's just that it comes up constantly. Everyone is surprised that I can like summer. It's strange. I thought everyone liked summer? Maybe that's because everyone in my family loves summer, so that's what I heard while growing up and this is one of those situations where I didn't my family wasn't like the ones around me. Putting that aside, why is it so strange that someone out in the world could feasibly prefer summer to winter?

I don't really know where I'm going with this, but was just thinking about how nice and hot out it is today and that's what followed.

People are just always shocked when I say that I don't care about being hot. I don't know what to say man, I just don't mind it.

I've been having a hard time writing lately and I think that a lot of it is due to me not being able to articulate just how dumb I think the world is. During the height of the uprisings all over North America (they are still going on), I tried to not say much because I didn't want to take up space. I'm now shocked to see people moving on so quickly. It really sucks. That all of this is against the backdrop of COVID now starting to take even more of a hold in the States is so fucked. Everything is fucked man.

Wouldn't You Like to Get Away?

A couple of recent enthusiasms:

First, the TV show Search Party returned this week as a title on the HBO Max service.  I adored the first two seasons of this show (as well as Charles Rogers' excellent movie Fort Tilden) and am glad to see it return after it bounced around in network limbo for a bit. It lands somewhere between noir and comedy but is told from a millennial point of view in a good way, balancing the “that’s fucked up, I wonder what will happen next” breadcrumb trail with over the top silliness. It’s hard for a show to do that while maintaining the integrity of both, but doing exactly that is Search Party’s calling card. Rebecca and I blew through the first two seasons of the show shortly after discovering it and the waiting for the next installment was tortuous at first. Then it inexplicably got dropped by TBS and I stopped thinking about when it would come back.

The good news is that it did and the third season they already in the can could then be quickly released. This season is a huge pivot tone-wise, moving from the more noir tendencies of the first two seasons to a courtroom drama this year. A lot of interesting new influences were brought in this time as well and it seems like the show is growing in a cool and interesting way. Kind of an 80s John Waters vibe to a lot of it, especially in looking at society’s obsession with celebrity and media with a healthy scoop of camp.

Really can’t recommend this show enough. After making a movie that completely sums up the millennial zeitgeist in Fort Tilden and following that with a show as sharp and well-paced as Search Party, it feels like Charles Rogers will be someone everyone will love in ten years. Also, he has one of my favourite accounts on Instagram and is so consistently hilarious.

Second, this week I finished an 8-year-long watch of Cheers.

Whenever I have a piece of media that I care deeply about, I always feel the need to write some long saccharine essay about it on IMU. I know that it’s fine and normal to do that, but part of me also feels kind of embarrassed after the fact about having these odes to TV shows and albums on here. For that reason, I’m currently resisting the urge about writing a long-winded thing about how Cheers weirdly hit me at the exact right time in my life and I formed a weird emotional bond with it right away.

I guess, just know that I did.

Yeah, I was sad and watched a lot of Cheers in the summer of 2012. It was a nice escape. Since then, I’ve on and off worked my way through the entire series, because watching all 275 episodes felt like something I had to do. It's from such a different time in sitcoms and the episodes go down like water. There’s something so satisfying about the by-the-numbers storylines, that seemingly every sitcom has a version of, and the premise-set up-punchline nature of every joke. Rebecca began to joke that Cheers was my go-to “happy show” that I would put on whenever I had a shitty day or needed something to pick me up. Sam and Diane forever.

In all eight years of going through it, I never skipped the theme once. The build up to the chorus gets me every time.

Maybe Today Will Be Curious

This evening I was supposed to meet up with a friend to have a hang at a park downtown. Because of a miscommunication, he didn't end up making it to the hang. It was a pretty big hike downtown for me and since COVID is still roaring, though everyone in Montreal seems content to ignore that, I did the journey across town on my skateboard. The skies opened up about five minutes after I left the house and by the time I got to Parc LaFontaine I was already soaked. The rain somehow continued to increase and eventually I got to the point where I didn't care about being wet anymore. Fortunately, out of all the things I had brought with me, the only things that stayed dry were the two joints that I had with me in my cigarette case. Smoked both, put on another album, and decided to take a moment.

Being in a hot rainstorm was comforting. The storm cleared out most of the people from the park, but a surprising amount of people hang around. There were pockets of people in cutoffs and tank tops just standing in the rain drinking beers, not caring because it was still hot out. Those types of things make me enjoy the city I live in. "Nothing will stop me from having a beer in the park. Not anything."

The skate home was much easier, since I was moving downhill away from the mountain. While I was smoking at the park, I had put on Daniel Romano's latest release Dandelion, as the psych-folk seemed like the best fit for the situation. Wearing completely soaked-through clothes with the rain clearing was euphoric.



A quick rating of Daniel Romano's insane quarantine output:

1. Dandelion
2. Visions of the Higher Dream
3. Content to Point the Way
4. Super Pollen
5. Daniel Romano's Outfit Do (What Could Have Been) Infidels By Bob Dylan & the Plugz
6. Spider Bite
7. Forever Love's Fool

Once Dan (yes, Duff and I have now ascended to the level of Romano Head where we've turned him into a mononym), ended I put on In the City by the Jam and that was an equally enjoyable thing. As much as I could, I danced on a skateboard.

Other recent enthusiasms:

Rebecca bought this book at the Drawn and Quarterly story in Montreal and immediately recommended it to me. A white guy having an interest in Jamaican culture is the most basic shit in history, but I must admit that I fall pray to it as well. My longstanding love of ska, rocksteady, and reggae was an avenue for me to learn about the vital contributions of Jamaicans to Toronto's history and culture and this book continues that. The story is about a teen aged girl balancing her overbearing relationship with her mother with her friendships and the weight of her family's needs. Great stuff.

Becks and I have used quarantine to dive into Veep and it is so insanely good. With the world falling apart at the seams around us, it's been oddly comforting to watch a show that focuses on just that. Turns out that laughing at how shitty the human race is is a good way to deal with how shitty the human race is. 

My friends and I used to wonder how long it would take for Me Too to get to wrestling and it got there last week. I would say "Good riddance dicknose", but the sad reality is that most of these pricks will end up working again and the worst shit (LOOKING AT YOU JERRY LAWLER AND SHAWN MICHAELS AND VINCE MCMAHON) won't even come to light. It honestly makes it pretty hard for me to continue to watch wrestling. I stopped watching and supporting WWE years ago, but more and more it looks like the industry as a whole is just fucked and should go away. Even the voices who I really valued for bringing more progressive and inclusive views into wrestling, like Brandon Stroud and Joey Ryan, turned out to be predatory pieces of horseshit themselves. If even the good eggs turn out to be insidious creeps, then who even is worth supporting?

Speaking with white friends, it seems like most people have gotten burnt out reading the news and trying to find ways to help against systemic racism and police brutality. It's tough reading bad news, but the reality is that everyone needs to take a breath, dig in harder, and get back to it. Never stop reevaluating yourself, what you've said and what you've done. If you are white, you are part of the problem. You have to be strongly committed to anti-racism and it has to be a thing you think about constantly, especially in regards to what you do. There's never a hurdle where a white person is finally "good". Keep it up your whole life.

I Think I Hate You

It's hard for me to think of anything worthwhile to say at this moment. The world seems okay when you can be distracted for a day, but it's never long before something like a black man getting suffocated to death by a racist cop or a black woman being pushed off her apartment balcony by a group of cops who conveniently have their body cams off reminds you that our world is so profoundly flawed and basically not worth of existing.

Yesterday I figured that I would put up a Spotify playlist that I had made. Kind of seems trite now, but I don't know what else to do and I guess there's no reason I can't. It's mostly spacey ska/reggae punk songs that aren't actually ska songs. I made it originally because it's a little niche subgenre that I like to put on when it's really hot out and I'm smoking a joint. Some of the songs are anti-cop, so maybe that's how I can tie. Put it on and let's hope that one day a bunch of pigs will get their heads cut off in a public square because that's what they fucking deserve.

ACAB

No One Keeps Track Anymore

A little blog before I move onto writing something a little longer.

Yesterday while vacuuming my apartment I listened to Braid's post-reunion album No Coast.



I find that I come back to No Coast regularly and listening to it this time had me thinking that Braid made one of the best reunion albums. It's hard for me to not think that bands are just doing it for the money when they get back together. That's fine, use your reputation to get money while you can, but I never feel invested in what comes of it because the shows and songs never have the same ethereal "this is happening now" feeling. 

For whatever reason, No Coast more genuine. The songs still feel like Braid, even if they aren't as immediate as Frame and Canvas. It seems like a linear transition from their earlier material and the youthful outlook on heading out into the world is replaced by a wiser retrospective look on life. It also feels like Chris Broach carries a bigger load on this record, and his songs really carry it.

Of all the emo bands from the 90s who have gotten back together, like American Football and the Get Up Kids, I think Braid did the best job of continuing being the band they used to be, in a way that is still genuine, but also not overly nostalgic.

Two things:

1. We must put respect on the lead guitar on "East End Hollows". If that had come out in the 90s, it would be revered as all-time lick.

2. Any time I discuss Braid, I legally obligated to mention Bob Nanna singing the back-ups to "At Your Funeral" from when I saw Saves the Day and Braid play together in 2013.

We All Need a Fix at a Time like This

This morning I watched Emerica footwear's newest video Green.



Just wonderful stuff. Immediately after finishing it, I decided to go out for my first skate since the winter ended, so mission accomplished boys.

The video managed to hit at some specific part of my brain, this weird space that connects skateboarding to my sentimental side. Maybe it was the use of "Some Misunderstanding" by Gene Clark at the end. It was probably also due in part to the video starting with fast punk music. Either way, it captivated me and gave me that "I need to go skate right now" feeling.

Context is also important here. Last year, Emerica's most visible and longtime rider Andrew Reynolds, one of my very favourites and one of skateboarding's all-time greats, left the company for the greener pastures of Vans. It's probably difficult for non-skaters to get how big of a deal that was, but rest assured that everyone couldn't believe it had happened. Reynolds was synonymous with Emerica and I wondered how the company would fare with its biggest name and cashcow now riding for another company.

Green is Emerica's first video since the Reynolds departure and I think that this in an undercurrent that runs throughout it. In a bold move, the video only features two parts: the supremely underrated Dakota Servold and Jon Dickson. Other riders from Baker and Deathwish, both of which are closely associated with Emerica, make cameos, but all the action focuses on these two. Both deliver amazing parts that touch on all my favourite parts of skating, valuing spots, style, and gnarliness over technicality. Though it's never expressly stated, having just two riders put out long, great parts to make up the whole video feels like Emerica expressly stating "We'll be fine."

This cycle is kind of how the world works. A new shoe company is built around a young star and achieves its peak with Stay Gold. As he starts to age and settles into the part of his career where he is, with all possible respect in the world, a nostalgia act, the company withers like a tree and the leaves fall off. After this, the tree turns green and starts again.

Got to Be There

Something that's become increasingly popular are bands from my youth reuniting to play "nostalgia" reunion shows or tours. I guess that this is mostly a result of me entering my 30s, and things from earlier in my life now coming around again for a second time. When I was younger, it was funny to think of old bands from the 80s and 90s being fat shells of themselves and playing small clubs because I couldn't imagine that any pop-punk band of the 00s could ever be fat shells of themselves playing small clubs.

So then, three questions to answer during this post:

1. Are nostalgia reunion tours either good or worth it?

2. Is it better to bring back the original lineup, or use touring musicians?

3. Are full album shows bad?

Now that huge festivals are the norm for live music experiences, I feel like having a marquee reunion to headline the festival has become just as normal. It's no longer enough to just gather every band under the sun to play for 30 minutes over three days; you need at least one band to play on Saturday night that people thought they would never ever see.

This trickles down to smaller festivals, and even tours too. Even if you are putting together a mid-level punk festival, it seems like securing a reunion of some band from the 90s/00s is a top priority. I can think of when I saw Lifetime and Bad Astronaut at Pouzza I (very good!) and Treble Charger at Koi Fest in 2013 (very bad!).

These nostalgia reunions can be a lot more fun when you are younger and care more about going to festivals. When you're 22 and drunk for the entire weekend, the event is almost as fun as the sets themselves.

While I was in my most pop-punk phase during university, one of my favourite bands at the time was the Movielife, who were active in the late 90s and early 00s. I missed them the first time around, but fell in love with their album 40 Hour Train Back to Penn because of the influence of my friend Brian, who I was attached at the hip with at the time. The principal songwriter had gone on to form I Am the Avalanche (in hindsight, a much better band), and there hadn't been any indication of future activity since they broke up in 2003 (4? I'm not going to look that up). They quickly became one of those "Imagine if it happened?" bands and then the singer playing a Movielife set with Set Your Goals at the extremely 2010s emo festival Bamboozle.

They eventually did a reunion tour that I missed because I wasn't listening to the band very much and had grown out of my pop-punk phase. Then, last year that did another tour playing all of 40 Hour Train Back to Penn and Has a Gambling Problem at each show. I hadn't been to a show in a while and was feeling extremely guilty about that, so I decided to go, since I loved those albums so much.

The show was pretty bad and very embarrassing. Everyone who was there seemed to be in the same boat as me, and was more interested in standing near the back than doing stage dives to 40-year-olds playing songs from 2002. The singer was getting increasingly frustrated at the terrible crowd response throughout the show. He gave some pretty cringey speeches about how much fun it was to tour "back in the day" and how good the scene used to be. Singing a song about people get too caught up in the past while being on a tour playing an album from 20 years ago. It was impossible to read it as anything other than a guy trying cling to his last bits of relevance.

I think the last time I saw Less Than Jake falls into this too.

These two experiences convinced me that seeing old bands I used to like is always bad. Unfortunately, punk is mostly a young man's game and seeing bands you loved when you were 22 has diminishing returns. I can give a definite "no" to the first question.

But then I also saw Daggermouth play a reunion show in 2017 and it was so much fun. The band was obviously there to have fun and that came through so much in the performance. As much as I'm sure they were interested in re-living the glory days, it was, somehow, done in a non-pretentious way and everyone had a great time.

So, sometimes they work?

Neither the Movielife or Daggermouth brought original lineups with them, as I'm sure the hesitance to relive pop-punk's glory days as a 40-year-old is what broke up the bands to begin with. Instead, they had capable hands with them to fill out the sound. Hell, the Movielife's only original member was the singer, I'm pretty sure. It's hard to say that getting the band together is the missing element, because I'm sure that people who moved on from playing music when they were younger haven't practicing since then.

The full-album thing still really sticks with me though, as it's gotten so popular lately. Sometimes even active bands advertise that they will play their full classic album in lieu of a regular set. I will admit that this element is what drew me to the Movielife set. I figured that if I was going to the show, these are the songs I would want to see anyways, right? Instead it came off as such a cloying desperate move to get as many people to come to the show as possible.

When I saw Saves the Day in 2012, it wasn't exactly a reunion show, as they've steadily put out albums and toured throughout their whole existence, but it was pretty well after their period they're most well-known for. They played a mix of everything, including new songs, and it was great! I want bands to be excited for their own material. Play your songs because you are excited about them, not just so that we can hear them.

I'm firmly "full album shows are bad" now. Call me old fashioned, but I like being surprised when they play a song live. I like things being different from the album. I like it being live.

So, let's give it a no, no, yes.