So Can We Leave Today and Start the Next Mistake, or Are We Fucked This Time?

A quick summary of last night:

Jays surprised us all and won 10-5 at the Trop. Great game all around (Kaz home run and three really nice plays in the field by José Soriano), but I'll remember it for this three-AB run by Alejandro Kirk, which continued his hot streak that has lead the Jays back into playoff contention:

1. Double into the corner in which he barely legged out the throw. Then turned on the wheels to score on a single.
2. Home run on a pitch above the strikezone to deep left-centre.
3. RBI infield single.

Then watched Gregg Araki's 1999 movie Splendor with Becks. Already said it in my Letterboxd review, but I've been trying to get into Araki's movies and it just hasn't clicked yet. This was fun though, and I really enjoyed it.

Didn't want to watch any more TV, so I read some blogs on my laptop after, including this post from Former Clarity. In reading the part about Jeff Rosenstock's residency at the Metro, I was struck by the fact that the author mentioned Jeff playing the Bomb the Music Industry! song "The First Time I Met Sanawon," which felt... wrong to me?

I asked myself why I cared so much. The first response: BtMI! (always the abbreviation over "Bomb") was, ostensibly, a Jeff Rosenstock solo project in the beginning, even if it was always a collective, so maybe the division between Bomb the Music Industry! and Jeff Rosenstock is mostly semantics. I mean, some of the songs on I Look Like Shit were first released as BtMI! demos, right? But then why stop the band and stop playing the songs? I'm sure members of BtMI! beyond John play with Jeff live often, but is it a disrespect to play songs from the band with different people. Again, certainly no, but I guess I thought about it.

It might also be that I feel slighted because I went to the final Bomb the Music Industry Shows in Brooklyn in January 2014, documented in this, uh, documentary Never Get Tired, which always makes me cry and feel inspired. Maybe I feel slighted because I made such an effort to drive fourteen hours to the shows from a different country, and now the songs are being played live sometimes?

Jesus, there is a lot of self-righteousness coming out here.

I think it's more than I felt a certain amount of peace and finality in saying goodbye to Bomb the Music Industry! I had such an intense relationship to the band's music, where I identified with it so strongly at such an impressionable age and, to be honest, had a parasocial relationship with Jeff. I was young and very confused about who I was and how to navigate the world and Bomb the Music Industry! discography was something that made a lot of sense. In January 2014, I was starting the second semester of my master's, Beat Noir had just put out Ecotone, and I was on my first trip with Becks, three months into our relationship. More than saying goodbye to the band, I think I was also eager to say goodbye to the younger version of myself.

From a contemporary standpoint, I think that I'm still happy to leave the Timmy of his early 20s in the past. As a yute, I valorized the idea of never losing your youth and now, as an adult, when I see punk guys in their 30s that cling to records about getting broken up with and dressing the same as they did fifteen years ago, that idea doesn't hit the same. I think there's still a golden nugget of truth in the idea that you shouldn't grow up and lose the outlook and morals that defined you as a person when you defined yourself, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't evolve as a person.

Go to admit though, I put on some Bomb the Music Industry! while I wrote this and man, does it ever hit when you need it to.

Recently discovered this band Class Ring from Chicago through Axe to Grind's weekly radio show Friday Night's Alright. Really great lo-fi power-pop, college rock. Love the emo-y guitar lead on "No Faith."