Too Good to Be True

 I recently discovered the band Dazy via their collaboration with Militarie Gun, one of my favourite active bands, on the song "Pressure Cooker". The tune is huge, but it has a lot more poppy bounce than your typical MG song and that intrigued me. Looked into Dazy and lo and behold, they, like Militarie Gun, have been on an extended kick of releasing short EPs for the last two years. All of them are collected, along with some new songs, on the comp MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD, which rocks. Personal favourite cut is "Crowded Mind (Lemon Lime)".

I've always been a big fan of the novel Catch-22, which I predictably checked out because of my high school obsession with the ska band of the same name. As a 32-year-old, and really as a 22-year-old, I can say that the novel is significantly better. After reading Catch-22, I read Heller's last novel Portrait of the Artist, as an Old Man. It has a godawful title and while the book isn't as bad as that might imply, it wasn't far off. That soured me, but I've had Something Happened sitting on my to-read bookshelf for ages and decided to pick it up for the trip to Ontario that I'm currently on. Since I wasn't familiar with most of Heller's other stuff, I wondered if he was a one-hit-wonder, but it doesn't seem that way. Still really funny and irreverent, but in a completely different setting than WWII.

I mentioned the trip in the last paragraph to forecast it being the topic of this paragraph. WRITING. Returning home is always weird. The trip has been the most social that I've been since the beginning of the pandemic, going to my first show, dinners at restaurants, and seeing a ballgame. The social guilt of COVID is and will continue to be there and I always have a voice in my head telling me I should just be staying inside, even though that has killed my brain over the last two years.

We've been in Montréal long enough now that it has become the new home and that coming back to Ontario doesn't carry the same degree of homey-ness that it used to. Speaking English in stores feels weird, though it took about a day to get used to it, and even more jarring is seeing people without masks. That being said, the city that I knew and that I will always deeply love is still right where I left it and I still get around intuitively because it's what I've always done. As my French friend Valentin said, "Connecting with your roots man, there is nothing like it."

Tomorrow I'll be Perfect

 I've recently run into the most problems that I've ever had with grad school. So far, I've felt most comfortable in grad school and it's an environment where I know that I am capable to take on whatever challenges are presented to me. That changed over this past year, when I've had to re-do the proposal of my research project a few times and keep finding that I haven't made any progress through it. It feels like something is wrong or that there's a giant thing that I'm missing, even though I'm doing my work the way I've always done it.

I hated working in the office in the art gallery and held onto the idea of going back to school to do a PhD as the thing to get me through that time. No matter how much of a dick my boss was being, how petty people in the office were being, how disheartening it was to see how the art world actually works, I knew that I would be past it all in about two years and move on to what I actually loved. It felt even better when that was proven right during my first year and change in the program. I blew through my coursework, got to teach a lot, and did some cool extracurriculars. Then, probably partly due to COVID, everything seemed to slow down and work became harder and harder to do. Even though it felt like I was working hard and trying my best to re-frame and re-think things, it would always come out as a different version of the same thing and I would have to start over from the same place.

An unfortunate result of this was that the Flatliners lyric "What do you do when doing what you love gets you nowhere, it gets you nothing"* from their song "July! August! Reno!" was the first thing to pop into my head. I hesitate to identify with a statement from '07 orgcore, but I guess that's where we are baby. I haven't even listened to that song in ages, but the lyric was the first thing I thought of when I asked myself about how to phrase a post about struggling with school. Didn't want to put it in the title, because lord is that dramatic, but it bears inclusion in some form, so here it is.

*Never thought of Cresswell as a particularly strong lyricist and the fact that it was more or less impossible to type out that line in a way that made sense grammatically supports me in that thinking.

The better metaphor for this that I've held onto for the last three-ish months is that I am Dave Stieb, putting all of the work in, toiling through the entire game, only to have the whole project yanked out from underneath me right when I thought I had finished. I guess that the important thing to hang on to in that is that though seeing myself in an under-appreciated pitcher who suffered though defeat after agonizing defeat helps me feel not so useless at the moment, he also got the no-hitter eventually and he's still the only one to do it for us and hopefully that means that a victory is down the road for me too.

 

Graph Paper Guiding the Way

 Hard to describe just how hard orange and green CanCon rock videos that were just concerts hit in 2003.

I always figured that this was just a typical "boys out on the town" song, but it's actually about DnD? Don't know what I thought "Picked up an Elven barwhore" meant when I was 13!

Anecdotes! Anecdotes! Pt. 16

A precursor to the following anecdote is that in the summer of 2009, my friend Erik moved into a house in Leslieville with my friends Chris and Quinn. I basically lived at that house that summer and it was a fun time having our own place to go in the city for the first time. Since it was everyone's first house, everything inside was shitty in an endearing way. Their shelving unit for their DVDs, showing you just how long ago it was, was all lopsided and barely standing and Erik described it saying "Yeah, I got drunk the other night and tried to build it." Being young and just not caring about how things turned out and also thinking that drinking before doing chores was very funny to me.

Later that summer, Pat and I were the first ones to move into our new place in Guelph. We were excited about our new house, which was in a better location and was bigger and nicer than our previous one.* Everyone else in our house hadn't moved up yet and the excitement of the school year hadn't taken hold yet. We just bummed around, picked up a few things for the house, and then hung out at the new house, Fuck Mountain.

*Your first university house always has to suck, right?

Pat had a new desk for his room and we decided that we would put it together together because we had nothing else. We were also through a joint and thought that it would fun to, like Erik, do some menial chores while high. We put music on and started working on different parts of the desk before finally admitting that we were getting tired and wanted to stop about 15 minutes in. I finished the chunk I had going, looked at it, laughed and then took a picture.

I'm sure that both this picture of a crooked shelf and my memory of Erik's crooked shelf aren't that funny to you, but they absolutely kill me. Simpler times, I guess.

Every New Beginning is Another Beginning's End

I'm going to dust off an IMU classic and use a series of YouTube videos to go through a few thoughts.

Riley Hawk put out a new video part this week (last week?) and it's the first stuff I've seen from him since Baker 4. I was surprised to hear Turnstile as the music for it when the video started and will admit that I found it a little hackneyed at first, with how popular GLOW ON has been since its release. Don't get me wrong, the album is good, but for some reason the idea of taking the most hardcore song from the album and putting it to a Baker part was wack to me.

That is, until the end of the song started and the refrain of "I want to thank you for letting me be myself" started to repeat over Riley skating rails. It's hard to not read this editing as an intentional metacommentary on Hawk's family and how awesome it has been to watch him blossom into his own distinct skater that is constantly supported by his dad. Once again, I eat crow.

Someone posting about the "Closing Time" on Twitter sent down a wormhole. I am unable to resist that specific type of 90s power pop, especially when the band is known as a one-hit wonder. I love love love the bridge octave riff. It's the exact type of guitar work that speaks to me. Maybe it's me relating heavily to that sort of failure. Is a one-hit wonder a failure? Is achieving a huge level of success only to be unable to replicate that better than mid-level excellence? I'm not sure.

In any case, I watched a bunch of live videos, because I had never seen a live performance of the song. In this performance of the song on Leno, the band cuts out the extended intro, instead hitting the piano riff right away and only passing once before starting the verse. Dan Wilson's shirt and haircut combo is very bad. He atones for it slightly by playing a red SG instead of the weird sort-of Les Paul thing (why not just play a Les Paul) he has in the song's music video, but then starts this wavy hip dance during the song's first chorus. The shirt and dance combo is some big douche vibes, but "Closing Time" is at the peak of its popularity, so you can't fault the guy for feeling himself.

I also wanted to get a sense of what it was like to see the song performed for a big crowd, so I checked out this video from Pinkpop. Lo and behold, he starts doing the hip sway again! That makes me hate the move! It being a performative thing that he does each time makes it so much worse.

However, I was eventually won over by this video of the band playing the song in their hometown Minneapolis in 2019. The full intro! The same SG! The crowd knowing the words! This time, he waits until the second chorus to hit the shimmy and he got me. Him being old and embracing the fun of the song got me and it made the dance move fun. What can I say?

It Is an Up-at-Dawn, Pride-Swallowing Siege that I Will Never Fully Tell You About, Ok?

My fantasy baseball league has been preparing for our next season of play over the last couple of weeks, which has put me back in touch with a group of friends who I rarely talk to anymore. One of these friends is new to the league, and fantasy baseball in general, and when we assured him that he would do fine and that playing a six-month season of baseball wasn’t as daunting as it seemed, he responded “I figure that if the idiots that I went to high school with can do it, I can.”

His point stands, but it also made me wonder how long is too long to hang onto anger around the social dynamics of high school?

I guess I want to start by saying that the sentiment of my friend’s remark is something that I can relate to. I didn’t have an easy time in high school either and being bullied and relegated to the lowest social class of my high school was something that I carried with me for a while after that time. It profoundly shaped me in both positive (drove me further towards my interests, concretely defined my personality at a relatively early age) and negative (destroyed my confidence and mental health) ways. 

I say this because I too know how it can be powerful to take the anger and resentment you feel towards the popular or shitty kids at your high school and turn it into a personality that works for you. Saying that you’re better than them now makes you feel a lot better and most of the time it’s true. You’re out of an environment where other people have a say in what you’re supposed to like, at least mostly, and it turns out that you were right all along even though no one believed you. The lowness that you once felt is now being equaled by highs that you’ve created yourself.

I think that it’s also embarrassing to hang onto that for too long in your twenties as a big part of your personality. How long can you complain about people being dicks to you ten years ago? There must be an inflection point where your resentment about people starts to outweigh the power that it was providing you and really, if you are still holding things from that long ago, aren’t you just proving them right?

I don’t know that what I said is 100% correct. That original hurt doesn’t ever go away, but I guess I’m just advocating for having a way to deal with it after a while. Or maybe I just find it cringey to hear that sort of thing. That’s all I can offer.