That's Rad Yo, She's Gonna Get Naked

Note: I wrote the following this afternoon so that I would be sure to finish the blog later, before going outside and enjoying a bike in warm Montreal:

"I think that it is safe to say that summer 2020 is now over. Temperatures in the mid teens have set in in Montreal and it seems unlikely that they'll leave for more than a day."

Still rings true! Today was like the good episodes from the later seasons of Cheers. With the chill autumn weather and the start of the school year coming in, every day feels the same and too filled with things that distract me from what I need to do. Then a warm day blows through and it feels just like when Woody perfectly sets up a opening joke about Norm drinking too much and you're reminded that there is beauty in the world.

Weird paragraph, right? Cold fall weather : warm fall day :: generic later Cheers episodes : good later Cheers episodes.

It's been strange to think about what this summer has been like, now that it's over. Everyone has been repeating the same thing over and over since the pandemic started, but I guess I have to lean on that too and say that it was a summer unlike any other I've had in my life. What I was doing every day didn't change that much in the grand scheme of things, but the pandemic limiting where we can and what we can do did end up taking a toll by September. No eating out, no drinks at bars, no shows, no baseball games, no seeing friends.

Those are a lot of my favourite things.

Still, I guess it's important to try and maintain some levity in the face of this insane virus and that world it has brought with it, so here are the things I appreciated about Coronavirus Summer 2020.

Even though we couldn't "go out" the way we normally did, it was nice to see friends in the park. Let's all look at the sky and think about how nice it is to sit with friends and have a cold one.

I learned to ride a bike. It's nice to ride your bike through Montreal, especially at 5 PM.

This summer, I skated more than I have in like 6 years. Popping off a good ollie still feels amazing.

The NBA season was pushed back, so teams ended up playing early in the afternoon on summer weekdays. I wish that's when all sports happened.

Frig off virus. Getting pretty tired of this shit already.

There's Only One Hubba

 Yesterday I started to watch an episode of the skateboarding podcast The Nine Club, before realizing that if I was going to watch TV focused telling the stories of skateboarders, and casting YouTube videos does seem to count as TV now, that I should just watch Epicly Later'd, the pinnacle of the form, rather than a sometimes boring meandering conversation taped in a studio.

I watched the multi-part edition of the show on Guy Mariano, focused on him conquering an intense drug problem and re-emerging as one of history's all-time great street skaters with the release of Fully Flared, and that promptly went into another episode of the show as soon as it ended, since I've been watching them in a huge YouTube playlist.

The thing is, every skateboarder knows Guy Mariano. He's headlined several landmark videos, Video Days, Fully Flared, Pretty Sweet, and is up there as one of the strongest influence on tech street skating that exists today (how Guy still manages to do tech with an extreme amount of style is a topic for another time). After his series on Epicly Later'd ended, the autoplay led me to watch one on someone who I had never heard of before, James Kelch.

I find that these episodes, which tell the stories of skaters who fell through the cracks and weren't in the limelight, are often my favourite ones. It's fun to get the stories of the people you know, of course I want to hear Eric Koston's lifestory, but really those episodes just serve to fill in the areas in between what you've already seen. With episodes like this one on Kelch, Epicly Later'd gives you a much fuller picture of the world of skateboarding. There's so many small moments in this that equally hilarious, due to Kelch's natural charisma, and heartbreaking. We learn about what happens around the pros. 

Much like the rest of the world, everything in skateboarding isn't ideal. For every Nyjah making tonnes of money from Street League and Nike, there are those who could never make it happen, despite devoting themselves to it fully. They were still in the right place at the right time, but it didn't matter. Of course, those stories still deserve to be told.

Random Anecdote, Part XXIII

 Last year I was at a house show and some friends and I were hanging out with others we didn’t really know in the kitchen before the bands started. The house had bought  two boxes of Halloween chips for everyone to snack on and we picked out one of each flavour and laid them out on the table. We made a game in which we got each person in the kitchen to rank each flavour of chips. 

Sidenote: Somehow everyone seemed to pick either Salt and Vinegar or Ketchup as their top flavours. What the fuck is wrong with people???

One member of the crowd resisted the game in favour of bragging about being vegan. We then started to draw things on the whiteboard in the kitchen. We encouraged this person to draw something to which they replied "I only know how to draw eyebrows," before proceeding to draw that eyebrow shape on the board.

My friend then came out, saw the whiteboard, and drew an oval around the eyebrow, forming the face of the Pringles man. I don't think many other people noticed, but I really enjoyed knowing that this person draws the Pringles man mustache on their face every day. 

This is a Land of Riches

One of the most enjoyable parts of COVID quarantine has been delving into shitty reality TV with Rebecca. Watching people be cringey and do embarrassing things in the hopes of fame is something the two of us love to share.

Reality TV is now undoubtedly the most popular guilty pleasure when it comes to TV right?The schadenfreude you get when a reality show hits the perfect mix of over the top fake drama, top 40 music, and stupidity is now so specific that I think it needs its own long German word.  Wirklichkeitschadenfreude? I tried.

Netflix has recently started to develop its own MTV and Bachelor-style reality shows, after making many "prestige" ones like cooking travel shows, and it has been just glorious. They're never very good for very long (is any reality show?), but they scratch such a specific itch (see above aside) and it's so easy to indulge in them. Since the start of this year, our favourites have been The Circle, Love is Blind, and Too Hot to Handle. All have their faults, and could be so much better with minor tweaks, but who am I to complain?

A funny thing we've noticed in all these shows is a subtle addition of Christianity to all of them. It's never a main plot point or overtly present, but each show has had characters who are Christian and speak about it in more episodes than they don't. It surprised me because I'm not used to getting God in my trashy TV, though that could be because I mostly limited myself to The Challenge and, of course, Jersey Shore, in my youth.

Something else I like to think about though is how Netflix uses its user viewing data in its content creation. It's famous for doing this, as shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black were both written in ways to exploit viewers' watching habits. If you put a twist here and a happy episode here, someone is more likely to keep watching and get more eyes on your stuff. Keeping this in mind, I tend to consider this when it comes to most Netflix content, especially stuff meant for a wider audience like Love is Blind. 

So, does the steady does of Christian characters in Netflix reality shows mean that they think about attracting a Christian demographic? Is there a Christian lobby pushing for good, God-loving characters on The Circle? IS NETFLIX COMING FOR THAT YESTV/PUREFLIX MONEY?

Even on the recent Wipeout clone that Netflix put out, Floor is Lava, there was a team made up of a pastor and two of his employees (they were by far the biggest weirdos). I keep looking online to see if anyone else has noticed this, but it seems like no one else has really cared besides me.

Fortunately, there is one bastion of reality shows on Netflix untouched by the Bible, and that is the incredible phenomenon of Australian people doing home renovation, rating each other's Air BnBs, and getting back into the dating scene after getting divorced.

Random Anecdote Pt. 12

I was thinking about the shelf life of fads recently and before long, the king fad of them all, Pokemon Cards, came to mind. Whenever I'm reminded of them, I immediately think of one memory related to them.

Opening Scene:

A small portable in a school yard. It's a fall morning, but it hasn't gotten chill outside yet. Pokemon is at the height of its popularity. Though it has captured the imaginations of North American children everywhere, this only means that a precipitous drop in interest will be coming soon.

"Good morning students."

The principal begins to run through the morning's announcements after the national anthem. After giving some news about the school's Jog-A-Thon fundraiser, he pauses.

"Now, on the subject of Pokemon cards. Starting tomorrow, no Pokemon cards will be allowed on school grounds. This includes recess."

Our protagonist Tim turns in his seat to see his classmate Tyler dropping his head into his hands in anguish, a 2" binder full of Pokemon cards open on his desk.

There aren't any other scenes!

That moment really sums up the experience of every fad (Crazy Bones, yo-yos, Pogs) to me. Though Pokemon as a franchise has persisted longer than I'm sure any North American parent saw coming, the cards came and went pretty fast. Pokemon cards were such an intense thing while they were here and an economy developed around them among kids so fast. Every kid knew they wanted a Charizard (I was sadly only able to muster a Chansey) and was on a quest to trade up for it. It's funny for me to think of Tyler dying inside in real time in front of me because he couldn't bring his giant binder to school anymore, but there was genuine sadness there too, as misguided as it may have been.

What's also funny though is that I don't think many kids actually knew how to play the card game. We all created our own versions of how to play based on looking at the numbers on the cards, but the rules were too complicated for our dumb asses to understand. I only realized how the game worked years later when I played the GameBoy edition of the trading card game. We were so caught up in how badly we needed to own Pokemon cards, but none of their worth was based in us actually using them,* only in having them.

*Is Charizard actually the best card?

Fads meet at the most volatile crossroads of kids needing to fit in and parents having to be withholding because they know better. Your parents realize how stupid the thing you're obsessed with is and as a result need to dole it out in small doses. Sure, you could receive pack upon pack of Pokemon cards, like Tyler did, but then you start to expect everything you want and don't appreciate everything you have. And yeah, the fad your kid is obsessed is stupid, but if you don't give them a little taste, they're ostracized by their peers and being consistently put out like that can create some very real issues later.

Kids like such dumb shit. How will they ever survive?

Tryin' to Lose the Awkward Teenage Blues

Coincidences have to be one of the weirdest things about our human existence, right? You see a few things recur over a couple of weeks and it's easy to convince yourself that we're living in a simulation and are just pawns being manipulated by an unseen power. You can even convince yourself that a worldwide pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people isn't real.

This is on my mind because of two musical artists that seem to be circling me lately.

Coincidence band #1: Screeching Weasel

I used to love Screeching Weasel when I was younger. I  was really into learning the history of pop-punk at the time and being into My Brain Hurts made me feel like I was a bigger head than all of my peers listening to All Time Low. To be honest, the songs are still very good, but the "I hit women and SJWs are unfair" act that Ben Weasel has going on is a quick path to me not giving a shit about your band.

Sidenote: One day it rained at Ontario Place and the entire water park staff jammed into our break room to escape the storm. One person asked for an iPod to put on music and ended up using mine. They asked "What should I put on?" and I replied "I don't know, everyone probably won't like the music that's on there." Everyone teased me for being pretentious and then put the iPod on shuffle. The first song that played was "My Brain Hurts" and everyone made a disgusted face. I laughed.

So, how has Screeching Weasel turned up for me lately? My friend John started a vintage streetwear shop. Or page? Or account? I don't know how being a hypebeast works. Anyways, he recently did an unboxing video and one of the shirts he featured was a vintage Boogadaboogdaboogada shirt.

Then, when I woke up this morning I did my usual routine of downloading the most recent episode of Blink-155 so that I could listen to it while I took Pierre on his morning walk. This morning's episode? blink-182's cover of "The Girl Next Door".

Coincidence Band #2: Bob Seger

A couple of weeks ago, I watched Girl and Chocolate's 2014 skate video Pretty Sweet. Given how ubiquitous those companies (company?) have been in skating, the video is stacked and their team is pretty much unparalleled in terms of talent. The part that stands out the most to me in the video, for whatever reason, is Cory Kennedy's, which is accompanied by Seger's "Night Moves".

Whereas most of the video featured hip-hop or hardcore punk, Kennedy's super laidback and Pacific Northwest style of skating works absolutely perfectly with the long acoustic-driven song.

Man, what a part. Jeeze.

Yesterday my friend Matt tweeted "he died as lived, listening to Bob Seger's 'Night Moves' on repeat". That is ... the ultimate way to go. This coincidence makes a lot of sense, as Matt and I are essentially two version of the same person and have identical interests, so it's not a stretch that he would be pumping the Silver Bullet Band and I would be excited about him pumping the Silver Bullet Band.

THEN, Seger came back again. Rebecca and I have been watching the first season of The OC, a much-loved show that I have never watched. One of the characters on the show, Julie Cooper, is a women who came from a poor neighbourhood, but married a then-rich man and is now ashamed of her past and overcompensates with a rich lifestyle. Early in the season, one character refers to her past self as someone who loved Bob Seger, which is supposed to be signifier of her lower class background and taste and is seemingly unbelievable in the rich confines of Newport Harbor. Cooper then begins an affair with her daughter's ex-boyfriend, but ultimately spurns him in favour of accepting a marriage to the father of her neighbour, who cheated with her husband. This show is so stupid and it is very funny to me that Days of Our Lives in a different time slot was such a definitive show and identity-shaping moment for many people I know.

Anyway, the song that plays after Luke sees Julie say "yes" and drives away drunk? Take a guess.

The First Word that They Learned was Please

Now with an update on this week's Giant Brain Album Exchange Album of the Week, Mean Gene Okerlund!

This choice by Duff was unique because Sinéad O'Connor's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got is actually a record that I've tried to get into in the past, but ultimately gave up on. Even though I have a history with the record, it had been almost a decade since I had given it a listen, so our exchange was a good excuse for me to revisit it.

Deep down, I want to like Sinéad O'Connor because I think she's extremely cool. Like most, my knowledge of her came from the two most obvious places: Her cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U" on I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got and her ripping a picture of Pope John Paul II (JP2, for all of my Catholics in the know) on Saturday Night Live. I always thought the former was so badass and it's something that I've grown to respect even more with time. The Catholic Church's history of child abuse is firmly planted in mainstream discussions of the religion now, but not so much in 1992 (or 3, I didn't fact check #jschool).



I feel like so much of my relationship to older pop music was shaped by watching MuchMoreMusic while I was in elementary and high school. In addition to videoflows of music from the 80s and 90s, they would show tonnes of VH1 music documentaries, which would contextualize the bands I saw. Watching those shows was absolutely how I learned about Sinéad O'Connor and is also why I tend to only think of her in terms of her biggest crossover hit and her most infamous moment in the public eye. Not enough time in a superficial music documentary to really dig in, you know?

I deeply loved "Nothing Compares 2U" after going through my first breakup in university. In fact, me listening to the song on repeat in my tiny basement room in my shitty student house is probably the most melodramatic cliche thing I've ever done. Even so, every time I hear the song it takes me back to that time and I remember deeply the song resonated with me. For the entire duration of it, I felt present and it felt like I was being heard. That seems silly to say, considering I was 19 and didn't know anything about life or love yet, but I'm a silly person.

Of course, since I was 19 years old and still invested in skate punk, this version also got a lot of play:


At this point in my life, I'm willing to hear out claims on Me First and the Gimme Gimmes being much better than NoFX.

After revisiting the album, my opinion was more or less the same as the first time. I think that I appreciated it more this time, but it ends up being a little too all over the map for me. I wish the percussion on "I Am Stretched on Your Grave" was on every song. It feels like it's getting close to an interesting mix of Britpop, 80s dance, and folk singing sometimes, but then just when I get comfortable it veers into something else. Really, I want to like the album more than I actually do. I wish it was a cohesive thing that ties together all my expectations, but that's just not the case.

Maybe she has other ones that will do that? Probably not. Is it bad to limit my appreciation of Sinéad to her canonical moments? As much as I do want to steer out of the dumb a limited Western canon of rock and pop music, in this instance I tried and came back with the same answer. This reminds me of this scene from Lady Bird, which has stuck with me since I saw the movie and I think of all the time.

I Want to Taste the Salt of Your Skin

I'm wearing a vintage Kenny Rogers t-shirt today that my brother got me for Christmas in 2018 and it got me thinking about wearing the shirts of bands that you don't listen to, which has persisted as a hot-button issue in rock subcultures since merch really started to take off.

Not actually my shirt, but that is the one I currently have on.

Seeing somebody who more than likely doesn't listen to a band wearing a band's shirt and trying to needle them about their choice of shirt is something that the most basic rock bro loves to do. Case in point:



I guess that because you have devoted so much of your life to learning minutiae about a specific type of music, it feels good to identify and out somebody who is, in your estimation, a poseur. That will certainly make you feel big, but it also reflects more deeply ingrained gender dynamics in music, as especially rock music. How many of the people that he does it to in the above video are women? Does he gravitate to women rather than men because he assumes that most men will know? How many of those women were just panicking because they were put on the spot?

Being asked about the t-shirt that you're wearing is something that Rebecca has always worried about and that I had a hard time relating to. Becks hated talking about music and movies and their feelings about those things because there was such a history of men not believing their feelings were genuine. I couldn't believe that "Oh you like this band, name 5 songs" was a real thing, but obviously it happens all the time.

Who fucking cares what someone is wearing? Most male rock music fans are the type of losers who put any woman that listens to the same music as them on a unattainable pedestal anyways, so why are you purposefully trying to drive them away from that?

How that relates to my current shirt though is that the current fad of wearing vintage shirts is basically entirely built on wearing the shirts of bands you don't like.

Sidenote: Today, we were listening to Third Eye Blind's Self-Titled while driving. I wondered what type of merch 3EB has right now (it's all bad) and that led to me looking for their shirts on Etsy, where their 90s merch was going for hundreds of dollars.

A prime example of this is me right now. I don't really care about Kenny Rogers at all. "The Gambler" is a great classic rock staple and the MadTV skit was pretty funny, but other than that I have no tie to his music whatever. I like wearing the shirt because of commodity fetishism and because I love the aesthetic of old rock shirts. I can put on this t-shirt and because it's Kenny Rogers and it has the sewn-on stripes on the sleeves, it makes me look like Kelso.

Though at one time a celebrity wearing the logos of bands they clearly didn't listen to was grounds to roast them online, somewhere in the last 15 years the rock side of that argument lost so soundly that no one even noticed at all. Anyone bringing up that sort of argumentation now sounds like Abe Simpson in a bad way,* and we can see that reflected in current style.

*I find that "Ok boomer" got so tired after like a day. I get extreme chills of embarrassment every time someone uses it now.

Now, when someone wears a vintage t-shirt, like let's say an Instagram influencer wearing a Judas Priest shirt or something, it's about them acknowledging the spot that Judas Priest once occupied in music and pop culture discourse, rather than voicing your opinion of their music. What you're really saying by wearing your vintage shirt is "I know that heavy metal used to be dangerous and edgy and I like the aesthetic of the band". It's a post-modern way of interacting with popular culture, because we are now bringing the discourse and culture surrounding an idea or a band into our fashion choices, adding an extra, critical step in the choice beyond "I like the band, so I'm wearing the t-shirt", which I also still do.

I guess it's similar to other fashion trends coming back around again, like acid-washed jeans and hippie skirts, where a young person wearing them is doing so because the idea that it used to be cool is now cool enough to display that you know that.

More like Closed-Eye

One of the most fruitful friendships that I've formed in my life has been with Duff, who I'm certain I've mentioned on here before. Duff and I met through going to punk shows in Ontario with mutual friends. We weren't nearly as close as we eventually became then, mostly because I was deep into my party phase and Duff was nailed to the X.

Note: Duff is my only friend who remained edge. Kudos to him.

We became much closer after I joined Beat Noir and we realized that we had much more in common than we initially thought. We both loved reading, both loved keeping up with #peakTV, had similar politics, and actually both loved a lot of the same music (neither of us would have guessed the last bit). We talk pretty much every day and have had a running conversation for I don't know how many years.

A quick aside: Duff used to work in Guelph and would give me a lift home from campus on Fridays. We would have really funny conversations on the ride home and I joked about starting a podcast that was just a recording of us talking shit during this drive. We obviously never did, but this is the only good podcast idea I have ever had and it is the only one I will ever consider actually doing.

At the start of quarantine, Duff came up with the idea that we would give the other an album they hadn't heard to listen to during that week and we then established these rules.

The listener must:

1) listen to the album from start to finish in one sitting
2) consult all notes given by the recommender while listening
3) read the relevant Wikipedia pages for the album

After that we reconvene and talk about what we thought. It's been a nice thing to do each week and has made me revisit my own collection of music more critically, rather than just living on my Spotify homepage and the playlist of things that came out this year. Both of us have had hits (Duff showing me a late-60s Kinks record and me showing him Thin Lizzy's Fighting) and both of us have tortured the other person a little bit too (Duff listening to the Raspberries and me listening to Faust).

Today I was worn out from a bike ride downtown to get a COVID test. Turns out that going right from learning to riding into the city is stressful. When I got home, I was in a bad mood, but something that helped mitigate that was checking out Duff's recommendation for the week, the Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas.

Duff described them as UK post-punk's most ethereal band and that tracks. I had actually checked out an earlier release of theirs a couple of weeks ago, but for whatever reason that album didn't stick with me at all. This one was instead a dreamy, immersive way to escape the frustrated feelings that I was stewing in. For a moment, I thought it might be too adult contemporary for me, but that was only a passing feeling. This is what bad adult contemporary thinks it sounds like. Layers upon layers of vocals and effects that can take you away to another place for a little bit.

Before you thinking that I'm getting all highbrow pop critic on you though, I then turned to a Japanese ska-punk release I recently discovered and learned a bass tapping pattern.

And Consequently He Also Saved the Piña Colada Industry

I've never been a "bike guy" let alone a bike punk. This subculture has really flourished over the last decade or so and was something that I totally wiffed on because I didn't even learn how to ride a bike until last month. Once I learned, a friend graciously gave a bike to me, I rode it a bunch, went and got it all set up at a shop and now I guess I am a bike punk. I even have the rolled-up khaki shorts to go with it!

I must admit that a small part of me feels guilty that the bike will now take the place of my skateboard as my primary way of getting around. The divide between skaters and bikers isn't as strong as the former and rollerbladers, but I feel like it's still there to some degree. Is it possible to exist in both camps? I feel like yes, but this will be a new thing for me to navigate in the future.

While riding my bike to the bike this morning, the experience made me think of an anecdote that Dan Campbell told about the experience of writing The Upsides in which a formative moment for him happened while he was riding his bike through the city. Those sorts of bits of information always stick to me like Krazy Glue.

It made me reflect on that album and how singular my relationship is to it. I had such an obsessive draw to it after it came out and built it all into my personality so heavily. I had an "I'm not sad anymore" sign in my bedroom, had "I'm not sad anymore" written on my backpack, and had (still have) the "I'm not sad anymore" hoodie.

Note: I wonder constantly if this is the most valuable piece of merch I own. I was shocked when I looked at my discogs and discovered that my 1st pressing of The Upsides was my most valuable record by a landslide.

After that I never really got into the band's later stuff as much, though Surburbia did get some plays, and I quickly moved on from my interest in that sort of pop-punk. When I look back at the record now, I find the music, lyrics, and general message insanely corny, but I also have a deeply embedded nostalgic relationship with it that I can still fuck with it on some level. I think about how much I would make fun of a nasally pop-punk that centered a message of positivity above all else if they came out now. I think about how some of the jokey pop-culture reference aged like milk. I think about how truly embarrassed I am of some of the other stuff I liked at that time (I will never live down Four Year Strong).

It all makes for a strange relationship to the band in which I recognize that they are critically not very good and unbelievably corny in terms of punk and that I have to own that, but also that I have a real, emotional connection to the music and it did do very real, tangible things for me. Just look at this blog in 2010 for fuck sakes.

Maybe going through your posi phase is a necessary thing to do as a young person. I like to think that it taught me important lessons about keeping a level head and always looking for more perspective on things. I think it was also a way for me to ignore the world for a little bit in self-interest and only think about my own minuscule problems, which sucks.

All that said, this song is my favourite on the album and still bangs, so we can end on that.