Blacktop Manhattan Closed Reilly's

I've had this post ready in the chamber for a while, but didn't really know what to do with it. I think it came out way too nostalgic and sappy, when I intended it to be funnier and more self-aware. It started as a small idea with the title, but it turned into something else once I started writing it. Now that I've finished it, I can't say that I have any desire to go back and re-configure it to make it into something, but it's also big enough and took enough time that it doesn't feel right to completely delete it. The nice thing about IMU is that I can take these types of posts and let them live here. Nothing has to be complete and shiny here, it can just be a real-ish representation of my creative process.

Here's a thing about a band my friends were in in high school. Please know that I do not have the emotional investment in this band that the piece makes it sound like, but also know that Blacktop is one of the funniest and best things ever. That's a strange balance, I know.

***

One of the most exciting times of being a teenager was when my friends and I finally got around to starting our own bands in high school. We had logged our requisite hours of learning "Smells Like
Teen Spirit" and "Dammit" on guitar and were now ready to show those around us what we had. The dreams you have of playing in front of an arena when you're young immediately become a little bit realer once you've seen people you know take that crucial first step: Starting a real band that plays its own songs.

One day, you'll look back on this band and laugh at how many silly cliches they performed, like dedicating songs to their 10th grade girlfriends or playing simple guitar solos behind their heads, and the songs will seem hilarious in hindsight, even though you thought they were so cool at the time. 15 years later, no one will think about the band or ever mention it, but 15 years later you can still say that the band was the first one.

It didn't take long for Blacktop Manhattan to occupy a central role in the lives of all of its members and their friends. Funnily enough, I didn't even hear about the band from its members, who were close friends of mine, but from other friends who had been at one of their shows. "Our friends play in a real band now!" Their legend grew from there, I guess. Blacktop's shows were a premier social event. All of your friends would be there and someone would definitely have beer and weed. You would definitely meet at least five new people through mutual friends, including girls. You would immediately get the rub from the band because you knew them. On top of the social benefits, it was also a fun thing to do because you would get to watch your friends' band play and when you are a teenager at a concert, actual quality of performance means next to nothing. Damien is playing a guitar with a Bad Religion sticker onstage? That fucking rules. One person would always do a Nestea plunge off the stage and be carried around by 5 or 6 people. A concert! This is the best! On top of all that, there would also always be at least one other high school band on the show who was so bad that they will stick in your mind until the day you die. Teen Stranger! Broken Home! The Thundernuts!

Blacktop shows were a monthly pilgrimage for teenagers where we gathered at Victoria Park Station to head to the FunHouse or the El Mocambo or Club Rockit or the Opera House as a huge group. More so than house parties or dances, this is what my friends did. For a couple of shows, a friend and I designated ourselves as "merch guys" and sold the band's copyright infringing Pulp Fiction t-shirts and some pins that I had shoddily designed on Microsoft Paint.

I can't tell you how long Blacktop were a band, but it couldn't have been much longer than a year and was definitely less than two. After they broke up, the members formed two new bands, which also broke a begat new bands after that. The family tree began to include more and more members and started to intersect in new ways, but Blacktop Manhattan was definitely the thickest part of the trunk, right near the bottom.

After Blacktop and a post-BM band had broken up, Damien, who had played guitar in both, uploaded the band's songs on the website Newgrounds' audio portal. Since Damien was an active user, another user had found them and included them as playable songs in a online Flash game he had made called Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2. Online teens are noted for their verbosity, after all. The game was a simplified version of Guitar Hero when the latter was at the height of its cultural influence. Just like getting your song in Guitar Hero could vault you into millions of t-shirt sales at HMV or Spencer's Gift, "Hollywise" being the first song in SCGMD2 immediately vaulted Blacktop Manhattan into an internet legacy that none of the members could ever have expected.

Teens from all over the world began to leave comments on Blacktop's abandoned MySpace page saying "Please come play in Texas!" Teenaged girls would add me on the site simply because I was in Blacktop's "Top 8". Things snowballed from there. One day we found a video on Youtube that was a stationary picture of my friends in 10th grade set to "Hollywise". The video itself was weird enough, but even stranger was that it had 50000 views. We hadn't even made it! We later found even more of these videos, all with the same picture, likely pilfered from MySpace, and all featuring "Hollywise". Then we found a video of a pre-teen boy demonstrating how to play "Hollywise" on acoustic guitar, but not playing any correct notes. Just playing random parts of the guitar along to the song! Before long, we found videos of tiny teen boys covering "Hollywise" in their school's gymnasium. It was so strange and unbelievable that it eventually became the most plausible thing. Of course Blacktop Manhattan had turned into a viral sensation. What else would have happened?

The group of friends in Blacktop Manhattan's orbit separated but didn't split up after high school. Some of us went away to university, some of us stayed in Scarborough, some of us started working.
Near the end of my first year at school, Pat and I got a Facebook invitation to the Blacktop Manhattan reunion show at Reilly's, a venue north of Dundas on Yonge, across from the strip club Zanzibar. The band had a good sense of humour about their status as a viral phenomenon and thought it would be fun to bring everyone together to relish it. This happened in the golden age of Facebook event pages, in which many people would post on the page's "wall" in anticipation of the event taking place. Our friends went crazy and acted as if Guns 'n Roses then-yet-to-be-released album Chinese Democracy was finally coming out. Blacktop purposefully booked the metal band that Teen Stranger had turned into to open. It was perfect.

A big difference between the reunion show and the ones we had gone to high school was that now almost all of us were 19 and getting alcohol was significantly easier. In addition to the usual cast of characters at the show, there was another generation of kids, between a year and four younger than us, who came out because they had heard of Blacktop as the "cool" band when they were starting high school. Much like us when we were attending the real Blacktop shows, this was an elite social event for them. They were all wasted.

The show was a perfect party. The band was super sloppy because they had only rehearsed several times in advance of it. They played every song they had ever performed, even the stupid one-off ones, and indulged in silly things like dualing guitar and slap bass solos in a funk song that they had for some reason. It was a ridiculous and bad show, but that was exactly what everyone wanted. Blacktop Manhattan wasn't a good band by any measure and realistically, the reunion show performance was probably not that far off from how they had sounded in their prime. Everyone was drunk and had a ball.

Blacktop booked and ran the show themselves. Quinn's parents ran the door and security and let everyone in. After the band played, the crowd lingered in the venue and slowly spilled out onto the street. The wave of younger kids, all much drunker than they had probably ever been, wreaked havoc on the venue, wrecking the banister on the staircase and climbing all over things, undoubtedly doing permanent damage to Reilly's.

This briefly turned into a serious scene. The owner of the venue was pissed that this many drunk underage people had been let into the show and done so much damage to everything. Word filtered out, through a drunk and broken telephone, that he had told the band that he would never book another all-ages show at Reilly's ever again. To risk the actual structure of the venue was too big of a gamble.

Reilly's did indeed stop having all-ages show. Not long after that, the venue closed permanently. By my logic, the success and health of the venue depended on the fact that they regularly hosted all-ages show featuring local bands, so it followed that Blacktop Manhattan's reunion show was the reason it closed. I have no idea if that's actually why, and Reilly's' online footprint is scarce, so I will never know for sure and will instead continue believing in the myth of the first real band that my friends ever formed and is much more famous than anything I have or ever will do.

And She's Got One of the Best All-Time Laughs in the History of All-Time Laughs, She Laughs with Her Entire Body

Since I consider IMU to be the definitive document of my life, I feel it's important to write about important things that happen to me and the big changes I go through. I've accepted an offer to begin a PhD at Concordia in September! I think I should access my emo side (as if I have another side) and write a full post about that, but now I want to revive an old IMU classic and document this time in my life in a series of High Fidelity Top 5s.

Top 5 Things I Will Miss About The Annex
5. Wiener's Home Hardware.
4. Living by Bathurst (the 'Thurst) Station.
3. Korean food.
2. Christie Pits
1. Being able to see the CN Tower from Borden Street.

Top 5 2019 Records I Can't Wait For
5. Whatever Daniel Romano's 2 new records will be.
4. Vince Staples
3. Crying?????
2. Baggage
1. Oso Oso

Top 5 Post-1992 Steven Segal Movies
5. Fire Down Below
4. Half Past Dead
3. Under Siege 2
2. On Deadly Ground
1. Exit Wounds

Top 5 Bench Players on the 2019 Raptors
5. Patrick McCaw
4. Norm Powell
3. Chris Boucher
2. Fred Van Vleet
1. OG Anunoby

Top 5 Things That Will Happen During the 2019 Baseball Season
5. Clay Bucholz getting traded for a A piece that won't turn into anything.
4. Bryce Harper hitting 50 bombs in Philly.
3. Mike Trout leading the Angels to the playoffs and winning a series.
2. Yasiel Puig and Joey Votto becoming best friends.
1. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. getting called up and winning American League Rookie of the Year.

Top 5 Things I Can't Wait to do in Montreal
5. Eat a smoked meat sandwich every day and get high cholesterol.
4. Learn.
3. Become a better French speaker.
2. Go to see the Jays each year at Olympic Stadium.
1. Start a nice new life with Rebecca and our two bobos.

The Things That Set Us Apart

A big part of what keeps me so invested in music (in my case punk music specifically) is that seeing live performances can seem magical. The performer and their equipment mix together and during that time, they are more than what either contributes. The feeling that I get from watching a performer truly kill it is my equivalent of a religious experience. For that brief time, the world makes sense and I understand why we exist. You could say that this fleeting nature is frustrating, but for me it's part of the appeal. I have to be present because I know it will be done soon. It's special.

Equally special as that type of performance is when you see a band who you've never listened to and they blow you away. The feeling of their music taking you in and you realizing that you've found something new you love is hard to describe. It's joy, but you feel it physically.

I can think of a couple examples of this happening to me. Videos from the actual shows I was at are scarce, but I can find stuff from those eras. Sounds like a good IMU feature, right? Let's rock.



The first example I always think of of being won over is when I saw The Sidekicks open for Bomb the Music Industry! in 2011. I had been at a friend's going-away party the night before and was in a little bit of a rush back into the city on a GO bus so that I could make to the show on time. It wound up being one of the best, if the the best, shows I've seen. I had heard the Sidekicks mentioned on then-venerable punk music site Punknews.org, but their live show was a better introduction than anything else I could have done. They were touring on Weight of Air and were so tight and dance-y and their soul-influenced power-pop was way different than all the 'org stuff from that time and has aged way better than all of it as a result. I've never stopped listening to the band since and have loved all their material (well, Runners in the Nerved World is just okay) since.



Once I went away to university, I almost immediately become interested in hardcore music, which I formerly scorned in the name of my love of ska. The aggression and heaviness of the genre started to make a lot more sense to me and I waded into the genre, as many other Canadians did, by listening to Comeback Kid's Wake the Dead. Comeback Kid then announced a big Canadian tour package with five other bands and I decided that this would be my first hardcore show. Would I throw down? Stagedive? Would there be a fight? I didn't know what to expect. Rather than Comeback Kid though, it Bane who awed me that night. They were hyped and charismatic and exactly what I hoped a live hardcore show would be like. I bought a classic plain shirt from the Bane t-shirt factory after and couldn't have been happier about it.



I was really excited to see The Aquabats in 2006. I had just finished my final exams for the year and the show was the day before my birthday. The Aquabats were amazing and exciting and everything I hoped they would be. A different type of exciting was seeing the Aggrolites play material from their first two records. Before seeing the Aggrolites, I had never seen a good reggae band before. I loved listening to the genre, but my exposure to it in a live setting had been subpar local bands. The Aggrolites showed how dynamic, energetic, and heavy reggae could be. Their Beatles cover was one of the craziest things I've seen.



Just like the Sidekicks, I heard a lot about the Menzingers before I saw them tour on Chamberlain Waits with the Flatliners and Fake Problems in 2010. I expected a lot from the show, since all three bands had recent albums and were on an upward trajectory, and it was a great night. As soon as the band started, I could tell that they would occupy a lot of my listening for the foreseeable future. A lot of my friends kept mentioning that "Time Tables" was their favourite song they had heard in ages and I was convinced of the same when I saw it live. I've fallen off the band recently and haven't been a huge fan of their last two records, but they were such an exciting band in the early teens and it felt special to have all of my friends be captivated by them.


I've been working on a longer feature for the Wordpress on Oso Oso and that is what got me thinking about this specific thing happening. I was introduced to Oso Oso when I saw them open for the Hotelier in the fall of 2015. As the band set up, I asked a friend what they were like and he said "Super poppy. Like Third Eye Blind." It felt like under a minute later the band was into "Track 1, Side 1" and I was all the way in. They were really tight, with a big-time drummer, and I felt like I lived an entire life during song. That performance and Real Stories of True People Who Kind of Looked Like Monsters made them one of my favourite active bands and me seeing them the next fall and the yunahon mixtape convinced me that they are the best band in the world.

I'm Always Just a Beat or Two Behind

Yep, there's the familiar feeling in my chest.

Holding Me in Wrongful Suspicion

When you are a newly christened punk and a beginner bass player, you are immediately drawn to Matt Freeman from Rancid. His playing is given a primacy in the band that's super uncommon in most cases. Bass, being a rhythmic instrument, is generally relegated to the background in most bands, playing the difficult role of being integral to songs and provide a base (lol) for others to build upon, but having to do so subtly and from the back of the stage.  You go about learning your introductory songs, realize that pretty much every punk songs' bass parts are a simple mimicking of the rhythm guitar part and curse yourself for having committed to such a boring existence.

Then you hear how loud and extra the bassline of "Maxwell Murder" is and a new world of fast chromatic runs and bass solos is opened up to you. The paradigm is shifted.



The thing about the bass solo in "Maxwell Murder" though, if I may put on my bass elitist hat for a moment, is that it sucks. It's real showy, which is the purpose, but it's more or less atonal. Once you learn the parts that make it up, you realize that it's really just "Show-offy lick A into show-offy lick B" and so forth. The song would actually be better, and the bassline would be cooler if the solo was removed entirely. There's plenty of cool riffs in there already!

This is the unfortunate truth about Matt Freeman. In principle, he is someone for bass players to dream on: He has a distinctive sound and style which drives the band, that is at once percussive and often a key melodic element. But he is more guilty of anyone of the dreaded term overplaying. He adds too many parts to most songs and things that don't contribute anything meaningful to the song as a whole.

However, there is a smaller niche within Rancid's songbook in which Freeman is absolutely perfect and does all of his best work. That is the parts he writes for their ska and reggae songs.

In properly played ska and reggae, there is no room for over playing. The genre's rhythms live on restraint and subtlety and you need to be at your best as a bassist or the song falls apart at the seams. Freeman, who is a first ballot ska hall of Famer due to his time in Operation Ivy, knows this and I've noticed that his playing on Rancid's ska songs, of which there are many, is pulled back and not as in your face.






These are masterfully written parts and, in  my opinion, his best stuff. Writing something as free-flowing and melodic as "Time Bomb" is infinitely harder than something as fast and crazy as "Axiom".

But if he's capable of this level of playing, then why doesn't he do it all the time. It's a common paradox in music: You are capable of perfection, but only when you're not trying. Harnessing that problem in order to create good art is so hard and everyone who creates things struggles with it. In this way, Freeman and his wild, all over the fretboard playing is part of a greater narrative in music about the struggle to create things that are good and worthy. For this reason, Freeman's bass playing, from the simpler parts that appeal to me to the loud and stupid parts that appeal to me in 8th trade, is perfect.

Poking Fun at the Coffee Stains on Your Tie-Dye Shirt

It's easy for me to forget that good things are achieved through being honest and revealing yourself. Sometimes I get so caught up in trying to come up with huge new ideas to work on that I don't even realize how far out of my wheelhouse I am. I can be so quick to dismiss all the things I've written in the past, writing them off as subpar, diary-adjacent ramblings that aren't as worthy of praise as other types of writing. I think it's important for me to stop and recognize that me writing rambling posts on here that are one step removed from stream of consciousness is a valuable way to access the part of my brain where good ideas happen.

Over the last year and a bit, I've been trying really hard to branch out into more "respectable" types of writing like fiction and short stories. It's been a difficult hill to climb and I've found that I've been pretty unhappy with most things I've finished. I'm typically hard on myself in making anything, so I guess it makes sense that this is how I feel, but I also can't shake the feeling that all the stuff I've done doesn't have the voice that I want it to.

There's a certain tone that I'm able to access in my best IMU posts and in an ideal world I would be able to take that tone and lay it on top of a story, so that the result is something that is distinctly written by me, rather than me trying someone else's style on. I don't think I've been able to do that yet.

I was listening to Pete Holmes' podcast You Made It Weird today where him and his guest Ryan Holiday talked about the importance of telling a story that only you can tell as path to good art. I'm not sure if I agree 100%, but I do like the idea of applying that logic to whatever you are doing, whether it be writing, music, food, photography, or whatever else.

To return to how I started, I think that voice comes from being vulnerable and being real while you're saying something. Don't put something into a story if you don't feel it. Don't hack away on an idea because you've convinced yourself that it needs to be done this way. It's not working. Just be honest and say what you can.

There you go folks. A classic "life in general".

The Dying Art and, Like, Probably Totally Huge Importance of Being Earnest

While I was hanging out with my brother last week, we had a conversation in which we both expressed our dismay at the death of earnest in contemporary culture. I feel like the rise in popularity of the internet has contributed significantly. Exposure to constant streams of content has overwhelmed seemingly everyone and their go-to response is to fall back on irony, because then no one can make you feel insecure about not being familiar with trends that seem to develop, change, and become passé at lightspeed. If you don't care about anything, no one can drag you online for anything.

It sucks and I feel like authenticity is non-existent. It's hard for art to survive in these circumstances. I don't think that good art can be made without coming from a place of genuine enthusiasm. If you aren't putting real creative energy into something, it will show in the final product and turn out shitty. But these days it feels like everyone has to care deeply about something, throw themselves into making it, and then act like none of that matters when it comes time to talk about it. It ludicrous.

If you talk about something you like, people expect you to do it with an air of detachment. Why would you want somebody to not be attached to what they like? It's insane.

My main problem with all of this is that earnesty is slowly being turned into a weakness, and that's dangerous territory. I would argue that young men turning to right-wing nihilism is a result of them being afraid of how being earnest will be interpreted. They're ironically detached from the world to such an extent that lash out just to hurt people. If you make being vulnerable a weakness, then the person will stop caring about anything that happens and stop feeling compassion.

If someone is acting earnest, don't see them as corny. See them as true. People liking things is good and your interests are part of what makes you distinct.

The other side of that coin is to be earnest yourself. Don't make being ironic and irreverent your only qualifiers for liking them. These are things are as valid as anything else, but they're not everything and they're a little played out.

Somebody trying to take you down because something you earnestly like is "corny" is almost definitely doing it because they're scared to own the things they like.

Just be earnest and be real.

Know thyself.

"The Mets' "Go!" shouters enjoyed their finest hour on Friday night, after the Giants had hit four homers and moved inexorably to a seventh-inning lead of 9-1. At this point, when most sensible baseball fans would be edging toward the exits, a man sitting in Section 14, behind first base, produced a long, battered fog horn and blew mournful, encouraging blasts into the hot night air. Within minutes, the Mets fans were shouting in counterpoint--Tooot! "Go!" Tooot! "Go!" Toooooot! "GO!"--and the team, defeated and relaxed, came up with five hits and five runs that sent Billy Pierce to the showers. It was too late again, even though in the ninth the Mets put two base-runners on and had the tying run at the plate. During this exercise in foolishness, I scrutinized the screamers around me and tried to puzzle out the cause of their unique affliction. It seemed statistically unlikely that there could be, even in New York, a forty- or fifty-thousand man audience mad up exclusively of born losers--leftover Landon voters, collectors of mongrel puppies, owners of stock in played out gold mines--who had been waiting years for a suitably hopeless case. Nor was it conceivable that they were all ex-Dodgers or ex-Giant rooters who had been embittered by the callous snatching away of their old teams; no one can stay that bitter for five years. And they were not all home-town sentimentalists, for this is a city known for its cool and successful teams.

The answer, or part of the answer, came to me in the lull during the eighth inning, while the Giants were bringing in a relief pitcher. Two men just to my right were talking about the Mets.

"I tell you, there isn't one of 'em--not one--that could make the Yankee club," one of them said. "I never saw such a collection of dogs."

"Well, what about Frank Thomas?" said the other. "What about him? What's he batting now? .315? .320? He's got thirteen homers, don't he?"

"Yeah, and who's he going to push out of the Yankee outfield? Mantle? Maris? Blanchard? You can't call these characters ballplayers. They all belong back in the minors--the low minors."

I recognized the tone. It was the knowing, cold, full of the contempt that the calculator feels for those who don't play the odds. It was the voice of the Yankee fan. The Yankees have won the American League pennant twenty times in the past thirty years; they have been the World's Champions sixteen times in that period. Over the years, many of their followers have come to watch them with solidity, the smugness, and the arrogance of holders of large blocks of blue-chip stocks. These fans expect no less than perfection. They coolly accept the late-inning rally, the winning homer, as only their due. They are apt to take defeat with ill grace, and they treat their stars as though they were executives hired to protect their interests. During a slump or a losing streak, these capitalists are quick and shrill with their complaints: "They ought to damn well do better than this, considering what they're being paid!"

Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try--antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me."

Rustle of Spring

Something about the coming season of Major League Baseball feels different, but I've found it hard to articulate why. Pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training is normally a time of joyous optismism in which I am so happy to see baseball being played by professionals that the actual quality of the game and the fact that Opening Day is still six weeks away eludes me, but this year I'm having trouble finding that state of mind.

It could be that the league's labour issues, with owners doing everything short of openly stating that they are colluding against players, is weighing on my mind more than in years past. The free agent class of 2019 was supposed to be the biggest ever, but instead it's the worst. It's no fair and it makes upset at the sport.

It could be that the Jays are in the middle of labour issues as well and purposefully manipulating Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s service time instead trying to make the team better. It bothers me, but I also accepted that it would happen long ago.

It could be that the team will be very bad this year and more or less writing off the next 2-3 seasons, but I've been through that before and it doesn't scare me.

Something feels different though, for sure. There's a persistent reminder in my stomach that something is off and not the same, but I can't figure out what it is for the life of me.

To try and fix this feeling, I decided that I would re-visit what I think is my favourite book ever, Roger Angell's The Summer Game, during Spring Training. Already, in the book's first section which happens to cover Spring Training, I find myself being pulled back into baseball's romantic gravitational pull. I then realized that a huge part of the back also covers Angell falling in love with the all-time worst 1962 New York Mets and that it will also serve as a valuable companion during a terrible baseball year.

Maybe that's it. Everything I love about the sport is still here, I just need to hurry up and wait.

Bagpipe Lane

New Year’s came while it was cold this year. There had been warm ones in the past. This year it was freezing.

Two days later I walked back from a diner. It was 10 below zero. In a month, I would be used to this and wouldn’t notice, but now it chilled me to my core. My shoulders were tense. There wasn’t any snow. Everything was grey. There was only a couple of people outside walking along Bloor. Everyone looked at the ground and you couldn’t see their faces.

It’s weird that the year ends and begins in the dead of winter in the middle of the night. The beginning and ending are the same, like a snake eating its tail. Funny how everything looks so ugly, covered in salt and early darkness. Maybe everyone makes New Year’s resolutions because everything around them looks like shit. Why make a resolution when everything around you is dead?