Shots Rang Out

I guess that it's important to strike a balance between "not feeling like I need to be the most productive I've ever been in my life" and "not writing at all during quarantine".

This week it has felt like we've settled into the new normal of quarantine. Everyone has stopped making jokes about how they can finally just hang out and do nothing, myself included. After two weeks of being sort of forced into this new weird life, I'm starting to get a feel for it and it's sinking in that this is just how things are now and it's not a break from life.

I'm typically a pretty self-motivated person, but it's been hard to move from full-time classes and a TAship to writing only on my own and an online TAship. As a student, I'm fortunate in that I'm just writing papers for the rest of the semester, so the disruptions to my education were pretty minimal. The opposite has been true of teaching, as moving a year-long art history survey course online after 7 months is proving to be difficult. Kids are confused and anxious and it's so much hard to stay in contact and help them out. I can't imagine how tough it must be to teach to fully online courses as a professor.

I also find it interesting that this situation is also bringing Rebecca closer to people who we never get to see in Ontario. Neither of us have ever been big on video calls with friends and family, but we've been doing that consistently with all of our friends since this started. Maybe it's because everyone has nothing to do and never sees anyone. I like to think that it's also a result of just knowing that the person will be there and pick up when you call, but maybe that's a little on the optimistic side. As someone who can be withdrawn, and often doesn't reach out or communicate nearly enough, it's nice and important to be reminded that it's crucial to do those things.

I've been listening to so much Bob Dylan lately, something I really didn't see coming. I went through a phase of listening to his folk material when I was younger, but I'm having a great time digging into his stuff from the late 1960s and 70s now. My appetite is insatiable and it's convenient that there's hundreds of records at my disposal to chew on. Finding a huge discography, or bibliography, whose general form deeply satisfies you, like Dylan's music or an author that has a distinctive style, is such a fulfilling thing. It's nice to know exactly what you want to listen to and also that there is so much of it to look at.

Heaven is Close When You're Around

1. A blog post which delicately talks about my place in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. A post that makes light of the situation and provides some levity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I'll be real folks, I just don't know what to say. Everything is crazy and I don't even know all of the craziest things.

Being 6 days into my social distancing, I can at least say that I'm handling it well. I'm lucky to have Rebecca, a big dumb dog, and a small dumb cat around to keep me sane. In a past life, I would have put pressure on myself to write a lot each day, to finish all the songs that are lying around, to write an entire novel, but now I feel okay in not accomplishing that.

Maybe it's because I have school to (somewhat) guide me during this process. As much as all routine and schedule has fallen out of the world, I still have some things I need to stick to. I still need to research and write and do whatever my teaching has turned into now.

I think I'm starting to return to the state of mind where I'm not so intimidated all the time. It's so easy in academia to get caught up in what you think everyone else is doing and how you aren't matching that. Last week a colleague asked about my writing and I showed him the Wordpress and told him about IMU and he was flabbergasted. Little ego boosts like that are a nice reminder that I have in fact written things and also that it's okay that I don't devote every second of my downtime to it.

Some new music for you: Lonesome Valley by Mundy's Bay.



The first show I went to in Montreal was to see Supercrush and Mundy's Bay in a very cool venue called La Sottorena during August. It was under a Spanish restaurant and the layout felt a lot like the basement shows that I went to in Ontario. Maybe every basement show looks the same all over the world. That's a nice thought, right?

I was so surprised to see how packed the show was. There wasn't even enough room in the place to fit everyone in and that seemed entirely due to Mundy's Bay. A huge group of people were there to specifically watch them and there was an immediate sense of community around the performance. They were also really good! It's a mix of post-punk, shoegaze, and synthpop, and though that combination of sounds has recently become popular, they are the ideal iteration of it. Imagine if Turnover had a bigger sound with cooler influences and better lyrics. Bam.

Are they my new hometown favourites? Seems that way.

Don't Trust Hotel Clocks

I originally thought about writing this post last week, but things kind of got away from me and I felt like I didn't have the time to sit down and write.

The last week or so has been the first taste of spring that we've gotten in Québec and considering that this has been the worst winter I've ever fuckin' seen, 5° felt a little extra special. I couldn't help but revel in the joy I felt while I walked the dog in a form of daylight for the first time since November. Later that night, it also felt great while I walked up St. Laurent to a show that turned out to be great. In both cases, I looked around and liked everything I saw and it felt like I belonged. For the first time since I moved here, Montréal felt something like home.

I felt so good that I would allow myself to do the corniest thing in the history of this blog and post a song by the full band version of a solo song by the singer of Lagwagon.



I can't help but think of the couple of years when Pat lived here, which coincided with the early Pouzza Fests. At those times, Montréal absolutely did feel like a home away from home. Funny that it's my actual home now.

Liberties, Vol. 19

Listen folks, Liberties may not be a weekly endeavour anymore, but I think it's nice that it can still be a fun thing to put up here some times. Never say Timmy doesn't love you baby.

Get Your Patchouli Stink Outta My Store! Move It Lard Ass!

Given that High Fidelity has recently been re-interpreted as a female POC-centred TV series, I figured that it would be a good time to revive an IMU staple: A post of top-5 lists with a HF quote as the title.

Top 5 Types of Pakora I Had at Atma This Weekend
1. Paneer
2. Potato
3. Mushroom
4. Cauliflower
5. Paneer again

Top 5 New Jays I'm Led to Believe Are Good, but Will Be a Letdown
1. Travis Shaw
2. Tanner Roark
3. Chase Anderson
4. Shun Yamaguchi
5. Joe Panik

Top 5 Lines of The Circle
1. Ed's mom: "Confused???"
2. Chris yelling "Oh my god!" with dead eyes
3. Shubie saying "protective"
4. Anyone saying "honest" or "real"
5. Rebecca's speech about how hard it is to be a man

Top 5 Bob Dylan Songs that Are Better as a Live Bootleg
1. Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You
2. Blowin' in the Wind
3. Hurricane
4. It Ain't Me Babe
5. Romance in Durango

Top 5 Ingredients in Macaroni Salad
1. Mayonaise
2. Vinegar
3. Macaroni
4. Red pepper
5. Celery

Top 5 Non-Buffy Buffyverse Ass-Kickers
1. Angel
2. Faith
3. Gunn
4. Principal Wood
5. Riley

I've found this year to be pretty light on music so far, so the first thing released this year that I've really enjoyed is It's Easy to Feel Like a Nobody When You're Living in the City by Juiceboxxx. I was completely unfamiliar with his lengthy underground rap career, but found "Coinstar Song" through my precious and beloved Spotify algorithm and became obsessed. Lately he's turned to lofi-DIY power pop that always sounds like someone who's been involved in various types of underground music scenes for their whole life. Great stuff.



Also, an old friend of mine from Toronto punk, Nick Gergs, who played in the extremely excellent and supremely underrated band Brauer, has a new band Shopvac who put out an EP this year. Also great!

Lean In To It

I don't really know what to post at the moment, so I'll just share this:



Hardcore can be the worst at reminding you how old and bad and exclusionary it is. You get so tired of dumb scene politics and dealing with people strange scene egos that you end up only talking about how hardcore sucks and is bad. But every now and then something like the above happens and you remember that hardcore can be the greatest, most productive, most revolutionary thing in the world in small moments.

I Swear I'll Hear the Devil Laugh

I now realize that something I took for granted when I lived in Toronto was how well-connected I was to the city's punk scene. Not that I was omnipresent at shows or anything, far from it, but that I always whenever a show was going on and how to find about future ones. Though towards the end of my time in the city I found that some of the newer music wasn't for me and that some of the things I used to listen to no longer rang as true, it was always there if I needed it.

Note: I regularly feel guilty about not having gone to a show in a while and then I scour listings, see a band I sort of like and go to a show that kind of sucks. That happened when I saw the Movielife last year. It was one of the weirder shows I've ever been to and I'll write about it sometime.

I don't have those same connections in Montreal, so it's much harder to find out about where shows happen and how to find out about them. I've made some headway, but I still wonder if there's a whole mass of good punk shows going that I don't know about. Because I don't go to enough shows. Scene guilt, man!

This is all to say that I was very excited when Montreal's Pouzza Fest announced their full 2020 lineup recently. There were a few bigger bands I would be excited to see (Millencolin and the Aggrolites) as well as a host of my favourites from Ontario (Wayfarer, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck, Stuck Out Here, Brutal Youth). Even though I had be spurned by Pouzza in the past, I was caught up in excitement and couldn't wait. It would be great to see Duff and I could show new friends, who are used to going to shows in France, what it's like in North America.

I went through the list of bands, picking out the ones that looked interesting to me, and made a playlist of them all so that I could re-invest in a type of punk music that had once been so important to me. Then, as I was listening, I realized that I thought most of the bands weren't great and that there was a reason I had stopped listening in the first place.

Oh well!

Such is life. There's a reason that I didn't know 90% of the lineup, and it's because that sort of music doesn't really resonate with me anymore. And that's okay! Some of the older "orgcore" bands will always remain in rotation, some others will carry a nostalgic value, where I appreciate what they did for me at the time and how much I liked them, but can't really vibe with them anymore, and some were just actually bad. All sorts! All of life is like that. Some things don't age well and some things aren't fully appreciated at the time and there's nothing we can do to change that.

That all being said, I'm still excited to see Millencolin, all of the Ontario bands I mentioned, and fill in the rest of the schedule with ska.

Some recent enthusiams:

Recently, I've been deep into a Cloakroom phase. Time Well seems to be the perfect music for the winter in Montreal. Shoegaze doesn't always do it for me, damn does it hit when it does. So heavy and morose, but with such great, secretive melodies on top of that.

I've been coming back to a collection of 1970's Bob Dylan bootlegs from the Rolling Thunder Revue as well. The band is so on point and it's so fascinating to hear some of the earlier songs built out with a full band too. There's also a crazy sense of urgency excitement in the performances that can only come from being at a good show with a great audience. Bob Dylan: Still really great.


Baseball is back most days and I've returned to the slow hazy process of watching useless Spring Training. A guy I used to know there. Players I'll never see again. Sunshine that reminds me there's snow on the ground outside. Even though I've been steaming at sport about cheating and the way it's run, to the point that I've gotten really for real angry and upset at the sport, I can't help but feel great while I watch it. That kind of sucks, but it's also nice to have it back.

Anata Dake No Mono

Over this weekend, Rebecca's sister came with her daughter, who is kind of sort of my niece. I admit that for a long time I would get annoyed when people I knew would post pictures on social media with their nieces and nephews and act like they were their children, but now I get excited to see her and understand the whole thing. She's nice and sweet and hearing "Uncle Tim" fills me with warmth.

For two days the temperature has hovered around zero and there's been more sunshine than usual. When you look out the window and keep your eyes away from the ground, you can believe that spring is coming. February is half over and the end is in sight.

Those two things have lifted me up a little bit from the deep low that I get into during the winter. I wouldn't say that I'm completely on my feet, but my legs are working to get me to stand up. It's hard to stop and look around during this year of coursework. There's always another essay to start and another reading to do. It seems unbelievable when I stop and think that it's been seven months in Montreal now, at once like I'm only on a long trip here from Ontario and like I've lived here for five years. Strange.

It's hard to force some words out, when I don't know what I want to say. That usually means I have to, *shudders* think about my feelings. I don't that minutiae about my degree is good fodder for the IMU machine, but it does seem like that is sort of all I can focus on. The only way to succeed at PhD is to throw myself completely into it, so I guess that I just have to accept that school is dominating the other parts of my life right now. That's how I frame it to myself at least. It's okay to put songs, zines, and short stories aside while I focus on this.

A little bit of knot in my chest, but one that has started to unravel. In a couple of years I'll look back at it and think about how it's been a straight thread the entire time.

I Got Jealous, Now I'm Embarrassed

It's always a joy when something you love returns when you aren't expecting.

Today's iteration of that phenomenon is a new edition of Stacey May Fowles' Baseball Life Advice coming to my inbox. Fowles, like our mutual influence Roger Angell before her, is so adept at describing exactly how the sport of baseball works its way into the lives of its true fans. I'm always willing to admit that she is an influence on how I write about the sport and does "I love baseball and I've got feelings" much, much better than I do. As I wonder whether recent developments are making me lose faith in the sport and I feel like I'm drowning in an ocean of snow, this immediately reminds me of why baseball is one of the best things in the world.

Rather that posting an excerpt, do yourself a favour and subscribe. It's wonderful.

Baseball Life Advice

Read her book too!

Man, I'm Gettin' Too Old for This Shit

A brief addendum to today's post:




Ska: It's still good!

When I listen to music this pop-punk a voice in my head tells me that it's too immature or something and that I should put on a 50-minute shoegaze record instead. Reality is of course that I like it a lot and the lyrics have a good perspective. You've gotta get out of your own way sometimes. It's great music and I can't wait to see what else the band does!