Losing Grip of What I Used to Hold

For a reason unknown to me, I was compelled to listen to "Zip-Lock" by Lit this morning when I left to get groceries at the market. It's a nice and sunny day today and it felt good to listen to poppy bro-rock from the late 90s while I walked through the neighbourhood. It reminded me of my last summer at Ontario Place, when it was often sunny, and when I was trying to give Lit's A Place in the Sun an honest go to see if I was into it.

From 2010-2011, Brian and I's musical taste was dominated by the Wonder Years' The Upsides. We got so excited during the press rollout for the album and then fell head over heels in love with the record when it came out.* During the height of our Wonder Years obsession, the band put out a cover of "Zip-Lock" that we, naturally, checked out because we were inhaling everything the band did. I had no idea who Lit was, since I was just young enough for the one-hit wonder craze of "My Own Worst Enemy" to miss me when it came out. I excitedly wondered if Lit was a long-lost pop-punk gem from the 90s that I had missed out on, since that was the precious thing I could imagine at the time. Kind of unfortunate in hindsight.

*Can't say that any of their music does anything for me anymore and I haven't even gotten nostalgic enjoyment out of the music in the times I've tried to revisit it in the last ten years. Was a nice thing to bond over with my friends at the time though.

I will admit that "Zip-Lock" is a huge tune. I think the main riff is a solid melodic hook, even if the pinch harmonic does really stick out like a sore thumb. I love the stupid snare drum fill before the solo. I think the lyrics are bad in "sensitive bro who wants to express himself and accidentally spits" way that makes them okay.

Brian and I used to leave each other messages on Facebook Messenger* while we worked our summer jobs in our respective hometowns, mostly talking about music and our friends. Brian told me that he had been listening to Lit a bunch since the end of the school year and that he thought it hit a Third Eye Blind sort of spot in terms of it being something that we sort of remember from the late-90s, but was actually a lot better than it seemed. I downloaded the record and planned to listen to it on the train ride to work the next morning

*Really it was MSN Messenger, but by this point that was obsolete.

Those train rides were huge in my consumption of music back then, even if in hindsight it was just times that I listened to different types of pop-punk. House Boat and the Swellers seemed worlds apart back then in a way that doesn't really translate to me now. Still, the time that I spent listening to albums on my commutes to and from the water park was when significant parts of my taste concretized. I was alone and had nothing else to do, which meant that I focused on the minutiae of the music and committed drum fills and guitar licks to memory.

This all to say that I was ready to love the Lit record and was dismayed when I found it to be mostly bad. When you're intrigued by one song, like I was with "Zip-Lock," you hope that there will be deep cuts that are as good as the one you know, but that didn't happen here, aside from learning that "My Own Worst Enemy" was the actual hit. Instead, outside of two good pop-rock songs, there was so much weird shit. Even as a guy who admittedly adores octave chords, why was every guitar lead just moving octave chords? How in the world did "You make me cum, you make me complete, you make me completely miserable" make it through the process of writing, pre-production, recording, post-production and release?

I think part of it was seeing the music videos and wondering how these very douchey-looking guys with rattail beards in flowy bright suits could have ever been popular. Sometimes the context helps to sand off the edges of something that seems retro in a bad way, but here it just amplified the hokey parts of the band. In hindsight, are they the most late-90s band that exists? I feel like when all the videos from Woodstock '99 went onto Youtube in the late-10s, Lit's set was by far the funniest. Just a band that was out of time as soon as their set ended. Everyone has spiked hair, bowler shirt on the bassist, guitar player as a steel plate pickguard, and then the singer takes off his wifebeater to reveal a pierced nipple and a pelvis tattoo that I'm 80% sure says "STOKED." Corny as that all may seem now, it's all quite earnest, as are the lyrics of "Zip-Lock."

No. Immediate Disqualification Because of Its Involvement with The Big Chill. Oh God. You're Right!

 Had a bit of a strange day yesterday, where I was going through it mentally, but also spent the whole day socializing with people I love. My social battery was blinking red by the time I got home, so I figured that I would put on something that was fun and nostalgic and when I got to High Fidelity in my Raspberry Pi library, it felt like the only choice. Becks didn't really pay attention and I loved reading through the Letterboxd reviews of people who hate the movie. It had been about five years since I'd last seen it and it still felt like a cold glass of water on a hot day. There's like five lines in every scene that make me laugh and watching it is sort of a way for to exorcise the worst parts of my personality from fifteen years ago. One of my all-time faces and, in hindsight, probably the perfect thing to watch when I am sulking in depression even as I'm surrounded by people who are happy to see me.

Figured that I would come back with and an IMU classic and throw some Top 5s at you in honour of the rewatch.

Top 5 Songs of the Summer

5. Three 6 Mafia feat. UGK - "Sippin' on Some Syrup"
4. Power Trip - "Soul Sacrifice"
3. Greg Mendez - "Sunsick"
2. Blue Smiley - "bird"
1. The Tubs - "Round the Bend"

Top 5 Moments of Ballon Velours Football

5. Tipping a corner that would have been headed in
4. The first time Val and I hit the freeze
3. Marcus puffing his cheeks and running a ball out of bounds
2. Felix saying he should slam a beer at halftime after he scored
1. Our lone win that I played in

Top 5 Action Films Seen at the Cinématheque as Part of Action!

5. Lethal Weapon (forthcoming)
4. The Crow
3. Hard Boiled
2. Assault on Precinct 13
1. Mars Express

Top 5 Post-Trade Deadline Blue Jays Moments

5. Nathan Lukes extra inning flyou/OF assist to preserve the lead
4. Vladdy first-inning home run
3. Ernie Clement jumping catch in shallow centre
2. Brendon Little striking out Yordan Alvarez
1. Nathan Lukes extra-inning home run

Top 5 Pods I Look Forward to Listening to While I Make Breakfast

5. Blank Check
4. The Bunt
3. The Wrestler Review
2. Hello and Welcome
1. Gate 14

Top 5 Records for When It's Sunny and I'm Walking on Ontario

5. Terry Reid - S/T
4. Third Eye Blind - S/T
3. Blood Orange - Cupid Deluxe
2. The Tubs - Dead Meat
1. Home Front - Watch It Die

Top 5 Records for When It's Rainy and the Back Door is Open

5. Larry June - Who Coppin
4. Ratboys - Singin' to an Empty Chair
3. The Replacements - Let It Be
2. Feels Like Heaven - Within Dreams
1. Greg Mendez - Beauty Land

The World Had Its Evil Way

 At some point in your adulthood, you realize that leaving certain parts of your youth behind is not only good for you, but necessary. Even better is leaving them behind without making a whole big fuckin' thing about it. Break up your band and don't play a last show. It adds to the mystique. Any attention for a transition is self-interest, right? Do we need to be that self-interested? My inner punk says no.

It is in that vein, that I was happy to abandon IMU. I think the only thing cornier than maintaining a blogspot into middle age would be making a farewell post about it. I would occasionally look at the last post I made and wonder why the hell I was writing and posting that. It feels crazy that the last post is only four years ago, because it feels like it was at least twice that.

Was a return to IMU inevitable? Jawbreaker, the Misfits, and Carry On say yes.* Though I guess what makes my case different is that rather than my absence building an appetite for what it could be life and creating discourse around the event, it just cleared out anyone who ever would have read this blog in the first place. I swear there is no hint of sarcasm when I say "God, that is so comforting."

*Operation Ivy stays undefeated.

I've been in a deep rut writing this summer and at a certain point releasing the "Return to IMU" switch felt like best way to combat that. The only way to actually improve your ability to write is to do it constantly, so rather than bang my head against the same Word doc for the 500th day in a row, I figured that typing bullshit, not worrying if it sounds smart or right, and nobody reading that would make the most sense after all.

A speed run for Timmy lore* since 2022: Pierre died. Jays lost the World Series in extra innings of Game 7 at home. CREW won the raid. Testified in labour court. Changed supervisors. Accomplished some school shit. Hardcore boom is over and sucks now. New Tone sucks now too.

*I genuinely hate the term "lore" and the way everyone uses it. Hate the obsession on lore as the load-bearing beam of all enjoyment of media. And yet, I use it here. Do you see how I debase myself for this blog?

I'll finish by saying that Public Opinion put out a new record today, The Curse of Public Opinion. I really liked their last record, Painted On Smile, but something feels off about the new one. Vocals feel a little to clean and auto-tuned? Maybe that will change with repeated listens. I used to think they sounded of a piece with Drug Church and Militarie Gun, but that doesn't feel as apt with this record. 

After finishing D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (generally good, sometimes felt long, often felt transcendent), I started Kevin Barry's Night Boat to Tangier. Slight Elmore Leonard vibes in the characters, so I'm cautiously optimistic. Maybe I'm just giving it grace because I'm trying to cosplay as Irish through my fiction habits lately.

Was planning to see To Live and Die in LA last night after seeing some friends but ended up just staying with them and having a wonderful night of chopping it up on Aziz's patio while fireworks exploded in the distance. Some would say that friendship is sacred. I would rephrase that as "Man was put on this earth to chill."

Gonna Lose Your Mind

 An update: In April, I had a post where I mentioned reading Joseph Heller Something Happened and how much I was enjoying it. Now that it's mid-September and I'm just inside the final 100 pages of the book, I feel confident that I was absolutely wrong and the book kind of sucks. I thought it was, for lack of a better comparison, Pinkerton, meaning a weirder follow-up to a classic, but it was a lot closer to Green, a later effort that occasionally captures the feeling that hooked you in the first place but has mostly lost the plot.

The book centres around a WASP-y republican businessman in New York and the goal of the book is to demonstrate, entirely through first-person narration, how shitty the dude is and, by extension, how shitty American culture is. But is 530 pages too much? Especially when it's mostly one-note? How long can we listen to him talk? Does devoting that many pages to this lifestyle not validate it?

I was speaking to my friend Val about this last night. In satire, where is the line between competently taking something down and valorizing behaviour through attention? Good satire obviously doesn't do that, but it's a razor-thin line. So, as a satirist, you need to aim insanely high and then hit that almost unattainable peak to succeed. Seems almost impossible!

It also sucks that most people seem to be happy to slurp up shitty base-level satire and then tell you that you "just don't get." How do we stop that? Do I have to resign to the fact that most people's taste is bad? Why can't everyone like good things?

Alone in the City, like a Single Flame

Of all the jokes, ideas, and things that have stuck with me from the 155 podcast, formerly blink-155, the one that I might think about most is the idea of “walking around music.” The old blink episodes were an immediate listen to me and a genuine highlight of the week, as it hit this particular sweet spot for me at the intersection of cultural criticism, cancon, and the pop-punk subculture circa 1992-2015, all filtered through the lens of blink-182, a band that I’ve obsessed over probably more than any other band in history.

Weirdly, I have many more “favourite” bands than blink-182, but they occupied such a huge place in my mind right when I was starting to define my musical taste as a pre-teen that their place in my brain is outsized. I was obsessed, and MuchMusic was giving me content, quickly becoming a figure 8 of influence.

Anyway, this idea of “walking around music” comes from chapter 3 of 155, when they transitioned into having themed months of their podcast, talking about a specific band or genre before moving on to something else the next month. I think the idea first came up during the first edition of Green May (take a wild guess who it was about) while discussing the song “Burnout” from Dookie. The two hosts were at a loss to describe the ethereal, nostalgic feeling that the most impactful music from your youth gives you. In this case, it’s pertaining specifically to the feeling of being a suburban boy listening to 90s pop-punk and eventually settling on “walking around music.” What they meant by this, or what I assume they meant by this, was that listening to the first song on Dookie reminded them of the feeling of walking to places as a teen, fresh with your first experiences of independence, and those memories being scored by that music. For me, All Killer, No Filler and Punk-O-Rama 8 would qualify as walking around music, as I have such specific memories of being on my grade 8 class trip to Ottawa and listening to those CDs on my Walkman while, well, walking around the city. It’s a term for music that strikes you as being unbelievably cool and exciting as a young person, and maybe more importantly, something new to you that you’ve never experienced. 

I should mention that the two hosts of 155 have never specified this reading of the term, and this is me dramatically extrapolating what they’ve said on the show so far (“Man, this is some walking around music.” “Oh fuck yeah dude.”). I also think walking around music can be applied to any era of music in your life once you understand the original context. Does me listening to Everything Sucks by the Descendents and Borders and Boundaries by Less Than Jake during the first month of second year qualify them as walking around music? Forty Hour Train Back to Penn and We Are the Only Friends We Have in third year? In my mind, yes. This is because the vibe of walking around music stays with you. I wasn’t as impressionable as I was as a 12-year-old, but I was equally excited about music.

What spurred the idea of this post was that this past winter, I was listening to the Greet Death album New Hell while I walked to my friends' house in January.* I was going through it school-wise at the time, and the mopey shoegaze of Greet Death was hitting me like nothing else at the time. I would work during the day, feel like a moron, listen to Greet Death because I was sad, feel even sadder because New Hell was hitting such a tender spot in my heart, and then… cook dinner for like two hours. New Hell is a winter album, as the band comes from Michigan and understands how coldness works its way into your being in a way bands from the rest of the States don’t, so trudging through the show to it felt like an enthusiastic handshake. As I crossed Bennett, I was illuminated like St. Paul, and it came to me: Greet Death is walking around music.

*Yes, I thought of this idea eight months ago and am only now writing—an IMU tradition. It may have also been February!

The pieces were all there. It’s a union of an independent music experience you’re having on your headphones vs the communal experience of being at a show, combining with the world around you in a way that makes sense to you at that moment. Am I just saying that walking around music is a historicized experience of finding the perfect soundtrack for something? That seems shallow and doesn’t express the strange, esoteric understanding of what walking around music truly is. It’s like that, but better.

Remember that You'll Always Be Part of a Ska Band

A common theme in my love of New Tone ska is that the releases have slightly disappointed me. I built up Kill Lincoln's Can't Complain, Bad Operation's S/T, and JER's Bothered/Unbothered a crazy amount before they were released, hoping that New Tone's ska-punk classic would come with one of them. Those records all wound up being good (maybe great?), but ultimately my expectations were way too high, though I've also come around on Can't Complain being better than I initially thought.

Bad Time Records put out a fantastic comp last year, The Shape of Ska-Punk to Come, Vol. II* and while most of the tracklist was bands that I was familiar with from the label, the fourth track by Eichlers really surprised me because it featured ska upstroke guitar over emo-trap drums. The vocals were also effected in a Wicca Phase/Lil Peep style. Honestly, it wasn't for me at all, but I was almost glad to see that someone was trying out this combination, because I hadn't heard anyone try it before.

*We've got to stop with the Refused/Ornette Coleman references. It's even worse than "____ is fucking dead."

Similarly I've been fascinated by Eichlers' record My Checkered Future because it presents a completely new take on the genre. Until the last few years, ska had been so stuck in its ways on both ends of the sonic spectrum. Good bands were often super orthodox and focused on trying to play an authentic version of rocksteady and bad bands were goofy Reel Big Fish rip-offs. Worse than there being no bands at that time was that there were almost no bands trying anything new or interesting. Eichlers is as far away from that trend as possible since it's a mix of emo-trap, hyper pop, and ska-punk. The songs are super short, which I always love, and the record is all over the place.

After giving it a listen for the first time and moving on, I saw a video of Eichlers playing live, featuring just the singer performing with a laptop, and it confirmed that it really wasn't for me. I love the idea of this band and the approach that they're taking, but ultimately there's a generational disconnect with some of the influences that I just can't get around. I'm just never gonna like emo-rap or tik-tok and have accepted that. That being the case, I still see weirdo kids making ska and that makes me happy because I was one of them once.

The most obvious parallel that I can think of for this record is the first three Bomb the Music Industry! records, which similarly took ska to places that it hadn't explored before. BtMI! (which I've always much preferred as shorthand for the band vs "Bomb") was the first ska band I heard to use fake drums and instruments the way they did and to me, Eichlers seem like a new version of what BtMI! were doing from 2003-2006. When I was in high school, I was so excited to be around what Bomb the Music Industry! did mostly because of how different it was. The songs were great too and I still like a lot of them, but their innovative things felt important and revolutionary.

So even though I don't like My Checkered Future, no matter how many times I listen to it, I have to respect it for being what it is and trying something new. I don't know man, this seemed a lot more articulate in my mind. 

The Killerman is Killin'

I'm deep into yet another writing of my thesis proposal, so all I have to offer is that I've returned to this music video a lot during the pandemic. I'm not sure why, but it's really comforting to watch it, and it's been reliable as something that shoots good feelings into my brain when school and a worldwide illness start to weigh a little bit. Is it creeping up my list of all-time favourite music videos? Yes!

Making All Our Bones Run Cold

 I've been finding it hard to write lately, so I did what I usually do when that arises and tried to think of a baseball post to write up. Laboured over that for about two weeks, and the end result wasn't quite the "professional" standard I aspire to on the WordPress, so instead it goes up here:

Something I struggle with is the urge to gatekeep being a baseball fan constantly. In my heart of hearts, I don’t want to, and I want to make sure that being a baseball fan in Toronto is fun and welcoming because sports can be such a toxic mess, but every time somebody I know hasn’t been a fan that long says something I find mildly annoying, it drives me up the wall. I understand that this makes me sound like an asshole, but I exclusively direct this attitude towards men if it makes you feel any better.

Most of these fans came on board with the Jays during the 2015 playoff run, which captured the attention of Toronto in a way that no baseball team has done since. Maybe only the 2019 Raptors have done the same thing? I was as excited as I could get about sports during that Jays stretch run, but I also wondered how I would deal with the bandwagon since that was a phenomenon that I hadn’t dealt with yet as a baseball fan. I expected to be holier than thou, much like I am at this moment, but I found it to be a great experience. Ticket prices shot up, but the atmosphere at the park and around the team was fantastic, and there was more energy than ever before. 

Those years of playoff contention proved to be short, though, and it wasn’t long before the team tended back toward its familiar place in the middle of the American League East (somehow, the Orioles shot down to the basement even faster than us?). I found it much harder to deal with these new fans as they navigated the usual routine of the team being mediocre. Fans seemed to live and die with every game the same way they had when the games mattered more, and I wanted to shake people and tell them it was okay to tune out Steve Pearce at-bats.

I wonder if part of me is changing too. I also had a period where I cared too profoundly and dramatically about each game when I was younger and single and didn’t have as much to do, so it might just be a phase that everyone goes through when they’re finding their own identity as a baseball fan. You’re always going to look back to seasons past during the summer, no matter the vibe. 

More and more, I find myself inching closer to my dad as a baseball fan. I used to carry such a massive chip on my shoulder about advanced stats, but now I find it so tedious when they’re brought up on the broadcast. Rather than living and dying with each pitch, I find myself pulling out and looking big picture. It doesn’t matter if Vlad (and Teoscar and Lourdes and Kirk and Chapman) are slumping right now because, to quote my dad quoting Earl Weaver, we do this every fuckin’ day.

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.