Why Can't I Ever Let it Go?

 Before I left to go to school on Friday, I saw my friend post a meme about listening to "Timberwolves at New Jersey" by Taking Back Sunday.* I never listened to Taking Back Sunday during the height of their popularity in the 2000s and could never get into them later, even as I listened to lots of Get Up Kids, Motion City Soundtrack, and Take This to Your Grave Fall Out Boy. Instead, the only familiarity I have with Taking Back Sunday songs is through the 2003 Halloween set by the Arrogant Sons of Bitches where they covered the band.

*Something that has always bothered me about this song title is that it's stylized as team nickname vs team city. Shouldn't it be "Timberwolves at Nets" or, if they as a Jersey band are trying to include the state name, "Minnesota at New Jersey"? I guess I shouldn't be shocked that the definitive third-wave emo band doesn't have any ball-knowers in it. 

Despite being quiet and shy in high school, I had such an oppositional personality, and so much of me was defined by doing the opposite of the rich kids at St. Mike's and by rejecting every part of punk going mainstream with 3rd wave emo. As a result, "my" dramatic high school music was the Arrogant Sons of Bitches, whose lyrics had almost the same melodrama as Taking Back Sunday, though it was cut with A LOT more cynicism about the music industry selling you punk, and was more about interpersonal relationships writ large than just sleeping with your friend's girlfriend. The world feels evil and crazy when you are a teenager and you need music that reflects the intensity of feelings inside you. Or maybe that's not the case anymore, I don't know.

I listened to Three Cheers for Disappointment and a few other fav earlier cuts like "Sorry, We Steal," "RSTLNE," and, of course, "I, Musical Genius" when I got to Concordia that day and it was a nice nostalgia trip for me. There are still a lot of lines that really resonate with me from the band and it makes me feel good that such a huge part of my personality was built on listening to Three Cheers and Discography constantly during my two hours of public transit each day. I can tell that there's a direct line between that experience and my worldview now.

I feel like I have a better understanding of my mental health now that I'm older and more mature, so it's funny to think about lines like 

"I take this mental anguish, fist thrown at my head. Because I'm right this time. Yeah, I'm right this time. I'm so right this time. These are my convictions that you're tearing down."

"YOU WILL NOT BE SEEING ME AGAIN NO MORE WHITE FLAGS I SWEAR THIS TIME WE'RE NEVER GONNA TALK AGAIN BECAUSE IT'S ME VERSUS THEM."

"Exhausted all the things I've loved and tortured myself. Can I just be happy? When everybody jumps on everything I said and everybody's telling me that we're best friends, I'd rather be dead or dying."

and then consider emotional, angsty, and confused teenager Tim. I was alone a lot and in hindsight I can tell that I was having trouble bearing the weight of that. Whenever I listen to this record, I always think about commuting to and from my high school lifeguarding job after getting dumped that morning. I had just managed to track down a digital copy of Three Cheers through the Streetlight Manifesto forum Skachilles and listening to the record after that experience felt like this. Silly teenage melodrama aside, I think having a transcendental experience listening to "Rocketrocketrocketship" was the first time I recognized that I was depressed and could articulate that to myself. As an adult, when I look at pictures of myself as a child, I look uncomfortable and sad most of the time. Three Cheers felt like I was being seen in a specific way.

Sometimes loving ska feels silly and it bums me out how most of the genre sucks. Other times, it feels like the best thing in the world. 

Old Irish

 Becks and I made good progress packing and managed to leave the apartment about five minutes after we had planned to. Normally, we're happy to participate in the fantasy that we'll actually leave on time, both secretly knowing that a 10 AM time of departure really means leaving at 11. Val and Vic were ready to go, and my choice to put the cargo box on the roof was vindicated when the trunk filled up. Val and I had been listening to trip-hop while working lately, and I put on Without a Trace by 16 Underground as we drove away from their apartment. When the EP ended about 15 minutes later, I asked for the next album, and Val vindicated me by saying, "I don't know, I like this trip-hop vibe." Becks chose Deadringer by RJD2, but said they wanted to change it after one song. I put on Twice Removed by Sloan instead.

We stopped at a McDonald's in Blainville for lunch, and Val, Becks, and I all teased ourselves for getting, and loving, it despite BDS. The menu had dirty sodas, which I guess means that trend will die in under three months. I think that the 15 is my least favourite highway in Quebec. Almost as soon as we turned off the 15 for a rural road, Val chose to put on Rainmaker by Last Days of April. I really dragged the lake of second-wave emo while I was at the height of my fourth-wave emo phase, but I think it's a fun quirk that I can still find things that are good from the era that I have no idea about. Since Last Days of April are Swedish, I'll also chalk that up to Val having a European perspective on punk, which in turn shows the value of meeting new people and expanding your worldview.

We got to the cottage about five minutes after Anna and Dave, and it was tiny and cute. I was giddy and couldn't wait for the weekend to start. They have a solarium in the back, and Val and I immediately had visions of smoking a joint there later. We sat around and talked while Dave put up string lights around the interior roof. I took the acoustic off the wall and started to lightly play. I used to avoid playing guitar around people like the plague, for fear of being corny, but I am trying to accept that most people like it. When I think back to living at Shanley, Mark, Duff, and I always had a guitar in the living room upstairs and it was something we passively did around each other at all times. Maybe it's silly to hide a pleasure like that from others, but I think it's also a sign of intimacy when you do it.

We went for a walk around the lake and looked at the other cottages. One property had made a path lined with orange cones and children's toys. I'm not sure if they meant it to evoke The Blair Witch Project but it kinda did. All the cottages were delightfully quirky in their architecture compared to the McMansion vibe you get in most of Muskoka and Kawarthas. What is the English word for a big rock? What qualifies as a boulder? Would you ever have your house number aligned vertically?

When we got back, we started to build a fire outside. I smoked my first dart of the weekend while we stood and blew on the fire. Anna brought out beers and chairs for everyone and we were all happy that they had bought Cracked Canoe. Each new log on the fire brought a new discussion. It got cold when the sun went down, and I regretted only bringing a windbreaker to wear over my hoodie. Val, Vic, and Becks all light smokes, and I decided that was a good time for my second. I asked if Becks would light theirs off the fire, but they just used the briquette. I lit mine off it instead. Crouched down to get closer to the fire and warm my hands. Turned around to warm my back. Eventually said I was going in and everyone followed for we could start making pizzas. 

Dave and Anna worked on the pizzas while the rest of us sat in the living room. Felt good to warm up and be among friends. We devoured the pizzas. I was excited for everyone to try Matt's hot sauces that I had brought. Becks always teases me about bringing my bluetooth speakers on trips, but I love to be the person who facilitates music on a trip. As we got ready to leave earlier in the day, I brought our old iPod Nano just in case we didn't have cell reception. That turned out to be my best idea of the weekend, since it worked with the speakers. We listened to Neil Young, the Cure, the Cars, Desmond Dekker, Nas, and Eddy Grant while we slowly ate and drank red wine over the course of a few hours. Anna expressed a desire to play Clue, since it was her favourite game as a child, but we worried we were too tired for it. Instead, we played Taboo and Dave, Val, and I went to the solarium to make good on Val and I's plan from earlier. You could see Val get sharper as the game went on and the joint wore off. What a joy it is to spend time with people you love. 

Went to bed and slept terribly. Woke up to piss, moved down from my single bed to another single bed with Becks and despite being slightly cramped, the extra three hours of sleep compensated for the first four. Our room was now cold from the door being closed and the radiating heat of the fireplace not making its way through. I second-guessed my expressed interest in a morning swim in the frigid lake, but I immediately changed my mind when I went outside and the autumnal morning sun hit my face. Quick dip and a few strokes out and back to the dock. Cold, but then adrenaline hit about 10 seconds after getting out of the water. Felt wonderful. 

Val and Vic made French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, and fried halloumi to go with our coffee, orange juice and kombucha they had made that week. We ate at a picnic table outside, and though it was cold, and the cold cooled down our food almost immediately, it was wonderful. Val rolled me a cig, and we sat on a huge rock right beside the water, talking. Could feel tension dissolving in me. 

We slowly packed and got ready to go. I thanked Anna and we hugged tightly. I've only seen her three times since she moved back. We took the scenic route back and it paid dividends immediately. I put on Who Coppin by Larry June and Becks asked if it was because he just put out an album with Posty. I realized I had forgotten to lock the cargo box and take the keys out of it, but I guess the wind pushed the lid down anyway. We pulled over, locked it, threw the keys in the glove box, and laughed about it. Vic put on Heroine by Wildcookie. I had been teasing her about having to choose something to put on during the trip, but she made a great choice. The drive was easy.

When we got back, Val and Vic insisted that they pay us for gas, but instead we just took six of their leftover eggs. That was more fun anyways.

All the Difference is Gone

I went through a bit of a Ceremony trip this week. Since the band now has seven records out, spanning 20 years, the band's place in punk subculture, and really in millennial culture as a whole, feels clearer to me. My friends wearing only black and white, HOAX and Iron Lung shirts, and Vans authentics with no socks felt normal at the time, but I can now recognize that it was indicative of the specific hardcore subculture that manifested in Southern Ontario from like 2006-2016. Ceremony was a huge part of that subculture and an omnipresent band, but TBH it took me a while to come around, and I think that my relationship with the band is different than the norm, or at least the norm as I observed it in the scene I was a part of. There's probably something to that about discovering music pre-algorithm, downloading records on your own, and having more autonomy during the iPod age. 

In any case, I felt unable to write a longer discursive post about Ceremony, so here are thoughts on them, organized by their releases.

Violence Violence

In the early days of blogging on here, a bunch of friends posted an early meme that was a picture of Ceremony singer Ross Farrar with two bottles of Sprite photoshopped over his hands and the caption "MY HANDS ARE MADE OF SPRITE." I didn't know that was a Ceremony reference at the time, but I knew there was something bigger going on in hardcore that I wasn't hip to yet because I was listening to Bane and Grave Maker. In hindsight, Ceremony was bigger and more popular than both those bands, but I felt like a poseur at the time.

Later, when I was living in Kitchener and playing in Beat Noir, most of the scene there was in power violence and playing in sloppy noise/hardcore bands. The impression I got was that they all held Ceremony's first record up as a classic of P/V, but lamented the direction they took after (the big homie James once posted a Facebook status that read "Man, Ceremony really fell off after Violence Violence), which is a funny point of view to think about now.

Still Nothing Moves You

When I finally got around to listening to Ceremony in like 2010, Still Nothing Moves You was the record that served as my introduction to the band, but I couldn't tell you why. I think that some haters were in my ear telling me that despite Rohnert Park catapulting the band forward in popularity, it was a dumb record, and the harder SNMY was the place to start. For a time, I said this was my favourite record by the band, which I guess had some benefit as a deep-cut pick that most people don't care about. I have a specific memory of listening to the opening bass riff of "Dead Moon California" in my bedroom in the Dublin House in Guelph, and though there isn't much more to the memory than that, I think that moments of art imprinting in the way you remember your life are worth something. Time, place, and sounds.

Rohnert Park

As much as the release of Rohnert Park was a 'moment' in hardcore punk, it bizarrely felt like my friends didn't talk about it that much. Sometimes you are in the eye of the storm, and you don't feel everything rushing around you. Or maybe I was on the outside. Still, while hanging out with Tanner, my friend who figures the most into my relationship with Ceremony, I got to his house, and he enthusiastically said "Man, listening to Rohnert Park!" About four years later, everyone started admitting that "Sick" was the band's defining song.

Zoo

The album I've listened to the least and that I think about the least, but I can give you another Tanner anecdote and say that he said it sounded like Nirvana after it came out.

The L-Shaped Man

Probably my favourite Ceremony album, as I listened to it a lot during a summer that I spent by myself in Guelph in 2015. That was the only time I've lived alone and The L-Shaped Man is one of the records I associate with that experience. On a weekend in the city, I went to go see Ceremony with Becks at the Garrison. Pity Sex opened, who we were most excited to see, and it was the only time I got to see them. Tony Molina was supposed to open, before I became obsessed with his music, but couldn't make it over the border. Becks had just moved to Toronto after finishing their undergrad and we took the Dundas streetcar and then walked back to their Kensington apartment through downtown. That was nice.

Though I was a confused person at that time, when I listen to this record now, and think about that phase of my life, everything makes a lot more sense. Kind of like how Ceremony makes a lot more sense.

In the Spirit World Now

Duff hated Ceremony for a long time because they were a band that everyone else liked. When The L-Shaped Man came out and people derided it as their worst album yet, he said that while everyone else wished that band would go back to the Rohnert Park sound, he actually wished they would lean more into post-punk. They did and, I believe, he then said that this was the first album of theirs that he liked.

Tell Me Your Dream

Really wish I had something incisive to say about the new record, but I've listened to it a few times and it didn't make a huge impression on me . Not that I think it's bad or that I have a hot take about where it sits in relation to their other records, but I just don't know. It did spur me to write this whole thing out, so perhaps there is something to this record in terms of the band reflecting on their career. 

I'll end by saying that I really like the new Cold Gawd EP, Glory2 and that this is one of my favourite songs of the year.