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.

Anecdotes! Anecdotes! Part 81

There was this kid named Derek that I went to elementary school with who used to just show up at my house all the time during our summers off from school. I don't know that I would say that I disliked him, but we weren't really good friends either, so I always felt awkward when he would appear at my parents' back door apropos of nothing. The first time he did it, I was surprised but mostly fine with it, but then he started to do it all the time.

One of the times he showed up we went on my home computer and he went on a bunch of porn sites. It's not like I didn't have the pre-pubescent interest in porn too, but I did find it weird that he wanted to do that with me in the room. My mom found them after and I got in trouble. Another time, he came and I just hid from the windows and pretended I wasn't there. 

During the summer after we graduated and before we started high school, he again came and talked to me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to go to the movies with him. We took the bus together, something I was about to start doing multiple times every day, but wasn't comfortable with yet. I had been to the movies by myself with friends tonnes of times already, but we had always been driven there by our parents, so the autonomy of not just going to the movies, but getting there by myself was alluring. Recently turned 13, this bus trip on the Bellamy 9 to the Eglinton Town Centre* Cineplex was the first thing I did that made me feel like a teenager.

*To be re-named the Eglinton Warzone in the future, when it became Scarborough's premier wrestling pay-per-view venue.

It was nice that Derek knew where he was going and could lead me through the process of transferring bus routes at Warden Station. Despite normally finding him annoying, and kind of weird in the cloying way he approached the girls in our class, on this day I found the conversation with him easy as we walked across the parking lot to the movie theatre. Compared to the version of him I saw every day in school, he seemed more relaxed and down to earth, free of the social pressures of a class full of pre-teens. Maybe it was actually me that was responding to that lack. It's hard to know.

When we got into the theatre, we bought tickets to see the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, which was Derek's choice, and our reason for coming. It wasn't something that I would have ever picked, as I was deep in my phase of only watching comedies starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, and Martin Lawrence, but at this age I also curtailed to mostly whatever anyone else wanted. Venturing out of my comfort zone, as much as seeing a blockbuster summer movie filled with movie stars can be qualified as leaving my comfort zone, proved to be great. It's hard to properly describe how a general crowd pleaser like The Italian Job hits when you've never seen that sort of movie before. The action! The quick jokes! The sexless romance! Is this the best movie I've ever seen? Why isn't every movie centred around a heist?

I left the theatre feeling like I was walking on air. Free of our parents shepherding us towards the parking lot having finished their parental task of taking us to the theatre, we went and hung out in the arcade, not playing any games because we didn't have the change too, but just drifting around and looking at the demos playing on the machines. Derek put a loonie into a small mechanical vending machine and received a cheap fake silver chain in a clear plastic container. While we again walked across the parking lot to the bus stop, Derek spoke about giving the chain to a girl that he liked at the trailer park that he went to with his parents in the summer.

Less than a month later, I started grade 9 at St. Mike's and took the TTC for two hours every day. Over the next four years, I basically lived on the transit system and it became my key to unlocking and learning about the city of Toronto. I was usually the person among my friends who knew how to get to places and the way that subways, streetcars, and buses connected was a language that I understood well.

I never saw or spoke to Derek ever again.

Nevermind

 *opens sealed envelope and leans forward*

The 2021 IMU Award for Biggest Surprise goes to Big Nothing - Dog Hours!

I guess that it's fair to say that I was already a fan of Big Nothing, as I liked their debut 2017 EP a lot, and enjoyed their first full-length pretty well, if less than the EP, too. I also saw them play a great show supporting the EP in the summer of 2017 and it was one of those nights that reminds you that punk is good, the scene still exists, and that it isn't you, it's just what you do.*

*A band that my friend Autumn was in opened this show, but the singer started throwing up all over their guitar pedals out of nerves like 20 seconds into the first song and the band didn't start back up after that. I empathize with them, but also can't lie and say that it wasn't funny in a cringe way. After the set Autumn said, in classic Autumn style, "I don't know what they were upset about. It was mostly water." Big Nothing, making me respect them a lot, mentioned how much guts it took to perform at the start of their set.

I knew that I would check out their new album Dog Hours eventually, but it also wasn't at the top of my most-anticipated releases. Colour me dumb because it's by far the best thing that either they or Spraynard have put out. The punk is turned down and the jangle pop is turned way way up to huge dividends. Only at the end of February, but it's at the top of my list so far.

All We Seem to Love is the Darkness

 I first meant to check out Greet Death after they did an interview on blink-155 as a full band, which is basically the best thing you could do to win my attention, and I planned to go see them on tour in Montreal, but that fell apart like the rest of the world did with COVID-19 taking off.

They stuck around in the back of my mind since then, but I also lumped them in with Deafheaven as a blackgaze band for some reason. I listened to one of their new singles on my Spotify Release Radar playlist recently and thought it was good and then found myself thinking "Hey, this is good and right up my alley" when another one came on before I realized it was them.

That sort of experience convinced me that it was finally time and I put on their record New Hell twice today while I worked on my thesis proposal. I know I've mentioned a few times before that there a sweet spot in shoegaze for me and this is absolutely dead centre. The songs hit me pretty well and at certain points it felt like they knew it was currently that awful point between the middle and end of winter, where it's still dark, always wet, and lingering more than you thought it would. I figured that was a coincidence, but when I saw that they were from Flint, I realized they knew this feelings too.

Nothing else to say, just that I am really enjoying this record and it feels perfect for this moment.

Anecdotes! Anecdotes! Part 66

Fair warning, I'm am reaching deep into the well of drafts of this one, so I can't promise that the level of thought and cohesion we all know is IMU's calling card will be present this months after the fact. Funny the way that happens, I'll jot down a few ideas to make sure that I don't forget an idea I found interesting, but the longer I go before writing it out, the more the connective tissue between the ideas disintegrates. In life as in blog. 

A deeply embarrassing thing about me is that I was a "rap is crap" kid. I wasn't all the way there and had rap records that I liked as a teenager, an inevitability growing up in Scarborough, but I would say I was 60ish% of the way there. I feel like this part of my personality was especially turned up in early high school when I was starting to get into my local punk scene in Toronto and was digging my heels in to make "punk" my persona. It was also due to the commercial rap of the time being dominated by Eminem and G-Unit, which I still haven't come around to liking.

Still, most of my friends in my neighbourhood listened to that stuff and it was often a source of banter with us. I would tell them that 50 Cent sucked and had no talent and they would tell me that NOFX sounded like shit and nobody liked them.

During one of our debates, I was trying to make a point that punk bands were better musicians because they played their instruments live (in hindsight, full-body cringe) and they played the music on the albums (yet another FBC). Two of the guys I was with, Chris and Vito, said something along the lines of 

"Are you dumb??"

"What do you mean?"

"The DJ plays the music."

"Yeah, from a record"

"No, they use the turntable."

They thought that a turntable was a musical instrument! And not in a poetic, "the DJ uses it like an instrument" way. They thought that turntables and the mixer were and instrument that played the actual notes of the song. 

It was one of those crazy moments where a short statement succinctly communicates how dumb the other person is. A beautiful moment of catching the other person and them just having to sit with it. The extremely powerful feeling of "I know more than you." 

In hindsight, is Get Rich or Die Trying or The Documentary better than Punk in Drublic or The Decline? Probably? A thought for a future draft?

It Had to Be You Who Broke My Heart

 Welcome to 2022 in I, Musical Genius. We are pivoting HARD this year and TRYING NEW THINGS. I, Musical Genius is going to INNOVATE and PUSH FORWARD. No more emo write-ups of albums. No more trying to sound intelligent when talking about movies or observations. We are putting our FINGER ON THE PULSE of culture. We will start with a discussion of a record.*

*I was reminded of the early viral video "Power Thirst" by Pinic Face today that my friends and I were all obsessed with in our university residence dorm. It's between that and "My New Haircut" for the things that best exemplify the early days of YouTube for me, though I wish people other than Pat and myself were familiar with the guy who did voice-overs of John Petrucci guitar instructional videos.** Maybe "Power Thirst" made me write out this dumb intro. Despite that, I still had to italicize I, Musical Genius, even though an moron probably wouldn't.

**My friend Katie married a great guy named Tom last year. I consider Tom a friend, but we were always kind of ships passing in the night. I feel like we have a lot in common and are two different versions of the same sort of Ontario punk guy. He's the only person I ever met who also knew these videos.

I found Esther Rose's album How Many Times last year, but didn't spend enough time with it for it to make it onto my year-end music list. Still, there are tracks on it and I've been enjoying it as some mopey winter music while the days are short and my mental capacity shrinks. I guess that giving a record its own proper write-up is actually more attention than something would get in a short list, but the prestige is reversed, I promise you.

Country is a bit of a weird thing for me and I don't think I've found my "guy" yet in the genre. I didn't listen to it much at all until Daniel Romano pastiched it on his first solo records, which is what opened my eyes to the good parts of the genre. I'm long past my days of believing that any particular genre is good or bad or more worthy or important than any other, but country is still a path that I haven't walked too far down. I'm sure there is a canonical great whose vibe clicks with me and who will kick off a gigantic country period for me, but that's in the future.*

*Apparently we're doing a lot of notes today. I bought the album Hard to be Humble by Mac Davis in 2019 and wondered if that would be something I would get into by virtue of owning. Didn't happen, but it's still a funny record. Also of note, I found this guy only just died and wrote songs for Elvis in the 60s (cool I guess? I don't know) and Weezer in the 10s (funny).

Sometimes though, the mopey forelorn vibe of a good country song does hit the spot and I find that Esther Rose's album is doing that for me at the moment. While Romano committing completely to the gimmick is fun, especially when the songs are that good, I also like Rose's personal lyrics on the record. "My Bad Mood" and "Coyote Creek" back to back is my favourite part. 

Becks and I are almost done Game of Thrones and the end of the show is pretty dumb. I was saying that it was still extremely watchable, especially as a binge, but that was before every episode was 80 minutes. Why not make ten 50-minute episodes instead of six 80-minute ones? High on twists and CGI, but low on good conversations. While the early part of the show showed people traveling everywhere for episodes at a time, everyone now just zips around to all corners of the map, which cuts out all the great character building that happened along those trips. I would also say that I thought Daenerys was dumb from the first episode, but that would require to wade into dumb fandom conversations that the show was surrounded by and that ain't me babe.4

I will also say that I'm at the end of season five of The Sopranos and it is the complete inverse, with the writing being just as if not more sharp than any other point in the series and characters growing now more than ever. Shout out to my twin Buscemi.*

*Real ones know