I'll Sleep Away the Summer to Be with You

Something comforting about living in Montreal is that the summers have the same sort of riverbed humid heat that I would experience in Toronto. I look forward to that heat all year and its sort of comforting that the same heat comes to visit me here.

My love of humid heat is contentious with most people I meet. Everyone hates summer because during winter you can always add more layers if you need to warm up, but in summer you just have to be hot. Everyone hates summer because they sweat and it makes them uncomfortable.

It's not like these are actual arguments or this is something that really bothers me, it's just that it comes up constantly. Everyone is surprised that I can like summer. It's strange. I thought everyone liked summer? Maybe that's because everyone in my family loves summer, so that's what I heard while growing up and this is one of those situations where I didn't my family wasn't like the ones around me. Putting that aside, why is it so strange that someone out in the world could feasibly prefer summer to winter?

I don't really know where I'm going with this, but was just thinking about how nice and hot out it is today and that's what followed.

People are just always shocked when I say that I don't care about being hot. I don't know what to say man, I just don't mind it.

I've been having a hard time writing lately and I think that a lot of it is due to me not being able to articulate just how dumb I think the world is. During the height of the uprisings all over North America (they are still going on), I tried to not say much because I didn't want to take up space. I'm now shocked to see people moving on so quickly. It really sucks. That all of this is against the backdrop of COVID now starting to take even more of a hold in the States is so fucked. Everything is fucked man.

Wouldn't You Like to Get Away?

A couple of recent enthusiasms:

First, the TV show Search Party returned this week as a title on the HBO Max service.  I adored the first two seasons of this show (as well as Charles Rogers' excellent movie Fort Tilden) and am glad to see it return after it bounced around in network limbo for a bit. It lands somewhere between noir and comedy but is told from a millennial point of view in a good way, balancing the “that’s fucked up, I wonder what will happen next” breadcrumb trail with over the top silliness. It’s hard for a show to do that while maintaining the integrity of both, but doing exactly that is Search Party’s calling card. Rebecca and I blew through the first two seasons of the show shortly after discovering it and the waiting for the next installment was tortuous at first. Then it inexplicably got dropped by TBS and I stopped thinking about when it would come back.

The good news is that it did and the third season they already in the can could then be quickly released. This season is a huge pivot tone-wise, moving from the more noir tendencies of the first two seasons to a courtroom drama this year. A lot of interesting new influences were brought in this time as well and it seems like the show is growing in a cool and interesting way. Kind of an 80s John Waters vibe to a lot of it, especially in looking at society’s obsession with celebrity and media with a healthy scoop of camp.

Really can’t recommend this show enough. After making a movie that completely sums up the millennial zeitgeist in Fort Tilden and following that with a show as sharp and well-paced as Search Party, it feels like Charles Rogers will be someone everyone will love in ten years. Also, he has one of my favourite accounts on Instagram and is so consistently hilarious.

Second, this week I finished an 8-year-long watch of Cheers.

Whenever I have a piece of media that I care deeply about, I always feel the need to write some long saccharine essay about it on IMU. I know that it’s fine and normal to do that, but part of me also feels kind of embarrassed after the fact about having these odes to TV shows and albums on here. For that reason, I’m currently resisting the urge about writing a long-winded thing about how Cheers weirdly hit me at the exact right time in my life and I formed a weird emotional bond with it right away.

I guess, just know that I did.

Yeah, I was sad and watched a lot of Cheers in the summer of 2012. It was a nice escape. Since then, I’ve on and off worked my way through the entire series, because watching all 275 episodes felt like something I had to do. It's from such a different time in sitcoms and the episodes go down like water. There’s something so satisfying about the by-the-numbers storylines, that seemingly every sitcom has a version of, and the premise-set up-punchline nature of every joke. Rebecca began to joke that Cheers was my go-to “happy show” that I would put on whenever I had a shitty day or needed something to pick me up. Sam and Diane forever.

In all eight years of going through it, I never skipped the theme once. The build up to the chorus gets me every time.

Maybe Today Will Be Curious

This evening I was supposed to meet up with a friend to have a hang at a park downtown. Because of a miscommunication, he didn't end up making it to the hang. It was a pretty big hike downtown for me and since COVID is still roaring, though everyone in Montreal seems content to ignore that, I did the journey across town on my skateboard. The skies opened up about five minutes after I left the house and by the time I got to Parc LaFontaine I was already soaked. The rain somehow continued to increase and eventually I got to the point where I didn't care about being wet anymore. Fortunately, out of all the things I had brought with me, the only things that stayed dry were the two joints that I had with me in my cigarette case. Smoked both, put on another album, and decided to take a moment.

Being in a hot rainstorm was comforting. The storm cleared out most of the people from the park, but a surprising amount of people hang around. There were pockets of people in cutoffs and tank tops just standing in the rain drinking beers, not caring because it was still hot out. Those types of things make me enjoy the city I live in. "Nothing will stop me from having a beer in the park. Not anything."

The skate home was much easier, since I was moving downhill away from the mountain. While I was smoking at the park, I had put on Daniel Romano's latest release Dandelion, as the psych-folk seemed like the best fit for the situation. Wearing completely soaked-through clothes with the rain clearing was euphoric.



A quick rating of Daniel Romano's insane quarantine output:

1. Dandelion
2. Visions of the Higher Dream
3. Content to Point the Way
4. Super Pollen
5. Daniel Romano's Outfit Do (What Could Have Been) Infidels By Bob Dylan & the Plugz
6. Spider Bite
7. Forever Love's Fool

Once Dan (yes, Duff and I have now ascended to the level of Romano Head where we've turned him into a mononym), ended I put on In the City by the Jam and that was an equally enjoyable thing. As much as I could, I danced on a skateboard.

Other recent enthusiasms:

Rebecca bought this book at the Drawn and Quarterly story in Montreal and immediately recommended it to me. A white guy having an interest in Jamaican culture is the most basic shit in history, but I must admit that I fall pray to it as well. My longstanding love of ska, rocksteady, and reggae was an avenue for me to learn about the vital contributions of Jamaicans to Toronto's history and culture and this book continues that. The story is about a teen aged girl balancing her overbearing relationship with her mother with her friendships and the weight of her family's needs. Great stuff.

Becks and I have used quarantine to dive into Veep and it is so insanely good. With the world falling apart at the seams around us, it's been oddly comforting to watch a show that focuses on just that. Turns out that laughing at how shitty the human race is is a good way to deal with how shitty the human race is. 

My friends and I used to wonder how long it would take for Me Too to get to wrestling and it got there last week. I would say "Good riddance dicknose", but the sad reality is that most of these pricks will end up working again and the worst shit (LOOKING AT YOU JERRY LAWLER AND SHAWN MICHAELS AND VINCE MCMAHON) won't even come to light. It honestly makes it pretty hard for me to continue to watch wrestling. I stopped watching and supporting WWE years ago, but more and more it looks like the industry as a whole is just fucked and should go away. Even the voices who I really valued for bringing more progressive and inclusive views into wrestling, like Brandon Stroud and Joey Ryan, turned out to be predatory pieces of horseshit themselves. If even the good eggs turn out to be insidious creeps, then who even is worth supporting?

Speaking with white friends, it seems like most people have gotten burnt out reading the news and trying to find ways to help against systemic racism and police brutality. It's tough reading bad news, but the reality is that everyone needs to take a breath, dig in harder, and get back to it. Never stop reevaluating yourself, what you've said and what you've done. If you are white, you are part of the problem. You have to be strongly committed to anti-racism and it has to be a thing you think about constantly, especially in regards to what you do. There's never a hurdle where a white person is finally "good". Keep it up your whole life.

I Think I Hate You

It's hard for me to think of anything worthwhile to say at this moment. The world seems okay when you can be distracted for a day, but it's never long before something like a black man getting suffocated to death by a racist cop or a black woman being pushed off her apartment balcony by a group of cops who conveniently have their body cams off reminds you that our world is so profoundly flawed and basically not worth of existing.

Yesterday I figured that I would put up a Spotify playlist that I had made. Kind of seems trite now, but I don't know what else to do and I guess there's no reason I can't. It's mostly spacey ska/reggae punk songs that aren't actually ska songs. I made it originally because it's a little niche subgenre that I like to put on when it's really hot out and I'm smoking a joint. Some of the songs are anti-cop, so maybe that's how I can tie. Put it on and let's hope that one day a bunch of pigs will get their heads cut off in a public square because that's what they fucking deserve.

ACAB

No One Keeps Track Anymore

A little blog before I move onto writing something a little longer.

Yesterday while vacuuming my apartment I listened to Braid's post-reunion album No Coast.



I find that I come back to No Coast regularly and listening to it this time had me thinking that Braid made one of the best reunion albums. It's hard for me to not think that bands are just doing it for the money when they get back together. That's fine, use your reputation to get money while you can, but I never feel invested in what comes of it because the shows and songs never have the same ethereal "this is happening now" feeling. 

For whatever reason, No Coast more genuine. The songs still feel like Braid, even if they aren't as immediate as Frame and Canvas. It seems like a linear transition from their earlier material and the youthful outlook on heading out into the world is replaced by a wiser retrospective look on life. It also feels like Chris Broach carries a bigger load on this record, and his songs really carry it.

Of all the emo bands from the 90s who have gotten back together, like American Football and the Get Up Kids, I think Braid did the best job of continuing being the band they used to be, in a way that is still genuine, but also not overly nostalgic.

Two things:

1. We must put respect on the lead guitar on "East End Hollows". If that had come out in the 90s, it would be revered as all-time lick.

2. Any time I discuss Braid, I legally obligated to mention Bob Nanna singing the back-ups to "At Your Funeral" from when I saw Saves the Day and Braid play together in 2013.

We All Need a Fix at a Time like This

This morning I watched Emerica footwear's newest video Green.



Just wonderful stuff. Immediately after finishing it, I decided to go out for my first skate since the winter ended, so mission accomplished boys.

The video managed to hit at some specific part of my brain, this weird space that connects skateboarding to my sentimental side. Maybe it was the use of "Some Misunderstanding" by Gene Clark at the end. It was probably also due in part to the video starting with fast punk music. Either way, it captivated me and gave me that "I need to go skate right now" feeling.

Context is also important here. Last year, Emerica's most visible and longtime rider Andrew Reynolds, one of my very favourites and one of skateboarding's all-time greats, left the company for the greener pastures of Vans. It's probably difficult for non-skaters to get how big of a deal that was, but rest assured that everyone couldn't believe it had happened. Reynolds was synonymous with Emerica and I wondered how the company would fare with its biggest name and cashcow now riding for another company.

Green is Emerica's first video since the Reynolds departure and I think that this in an undercurrent that runs throughout it. In a bold move, the video only features two parts: the supremely underrated Dakota Servold and Jon Dickson. Other riders from Baker and Deathwish, both of which are closely associated with Emerica, make cameos, but all the action focuses on these two. Both deliver amazing parts that touch on all my favourite parts of skating, valuing spots, style, and gnarliness over technicality. Though it's never expressly stated, having just two riders put out long, great parts to make up the whole video feels like Emerica expressly stating "We'll be fine."

This cycle is kind of how the world works. A new shoe company is built around a young star and achieves its peak with Stay Gold. As he starts to age and settles into the part of his career where he is, with all possible respect in the world, a nostalgia act, the company withers like a tree and the leaves fall off. After this, the tree turns green and starts again.

Got to Be There

Something that's become increasingly popular are bands from my youth reuniting to play "nostalgia" reunion shows or tours. I guess that this is mostly a result of me entering my 30s, and things from earlier in my life now coming around again for a second time. When I was younger, it was funny to think of old bands from the 80s and 90s being fat shells of themselves and playing small clubs because I couldn't imagine that any pop-punk band of the 00s could ever be fat shells of themselves playing small clubs.

So then, three questions to answer during this post:

1. Are nostalgia reunion tours either good or worth it?

2. Is it better to bring back the original lineup, or use touring musicians?

3. Are full album shows bad?

Now that huge festivals are the norm for live music experiences, I feel like having a marquee reunion to headline the festival has become just as normal. It's no longer enough to just gather every band under the sun to play for 30 minutes over three days; you need at least one band to play on Saturday night that people thought they would never ever see.

This trickles down to smaller festivals, and even tours too. Even if you are putting together a mid-level punk festival, it seems like securing a reunion of some band from the 90s/00s is a top priority. I can think of when I saw Lifetime and Bad Astronaut at Pouzza I (very good!) and Treble Charger at Koi Fest in 2013 (very bad!).

These nostalgia reunions can be a lot more fun when you are younger and care more about going to festivals. When you're 22 and drunk for the entire weekend, the event is almost as fun as the sets themselves.

While I was in my most pop-punk phase during university, one of my favourite bands at the time was the Movielife, who were active in the late 90s and early 00s. I missed them the first time around, but fell in love with their album 40 Hour Train Back to Penn because of the influence of my friend Brian, who I was attached at the hip with at the time. The principal songwriter had gone on to form I Am the Avalanche (in hindsight, a much better band), and there hadn't been any indication of future activity since they broke up in 2003 (4? I'm not going to look that up). They quickly became one of those "Imagine if it happened?" bands and then the singer playing a Movielife set with Set Your Goals at the extremely 2010s emo festival Bamboozle.

They eventually did a reunion tour that I missed because I wasn't listening to the band very much and had grown out of my pop-punk phase. Then, last year that did another tour playing all of 40 Hour Train Back to Penn and Has a Gambling Problem at each show. I hadn't been to a show in a while and was feeling extremely guilty about that, so I decided to go, since I loved those albums so much.

The show was pretty bad and very embarrassing. Everyone who was there seemed to be in the same boat as me, and was more interested in standing near the back than doing stage dives to 40-year-olds playing songs from 2002. The singer was getting increasingly frustrated at the terrible crowd response throughout the show. He gave some pretty cringey speeches about how much fun it was to tour "back in the day" and how good the scene used to be. Singing a song about people get too caught up in the past while being on a tour playing an album from 20 years ago. It was impossible to read it as anything other than a guy trying cling to his last bits of relevance.

I think the last time I saw Less Than Jake falls into this too.

These two experiences convinced me that seeing old bands I used to like is always bad. Unfortunately, punk is mostly a young man's game and seeing bands you loved when you were 22 has diminishing returns. I can give a definite "no" to the first question.

But then I also saw Daggermouth play a reunion show in 2017 and it was so much fun. The band was obviously there to have fun and that came through so much in the performance. As much as I'm sure they were interested in re-living the glory days, it was, somehow, done in a non-pretentious way and everyone had a great time.

So, sometimes they work?

Neither the Movielife or Daggermouth brought original lineups with them, as I'm sure the hesitance to relive pop-punk's glory days as a 40-year-old is what broke up the bands to begin with. Instead, they had capable hands with them to fill out the sound. Hell, the Movielife's only original member was the singer, I'm pretty sure. It's hard to say that getting the band together is the missing element, because I'm sure that people who moved on from playing music when they were younger haven't practicing since then.

The full-album thing still really sticks with me though, as it's gotten so popular lately. Sometimes even active bands advertise that they will play their full classic album in lieu of a regular set. I will admit that this element is what drew me to the Movielife set. I figured that if I was going to the show, these are the songs I would want to see anyways, right? Instead it came off as such a cloying desperate move to get as many people to come to the show as possible.

When I saw Saves the Day in 2012, it wasn't exactly a reunion show, as they've steadily put out albums and toured throughout their whole existence, but it was pretty well after their period they're most well-known for. They played a mix of everything, including new songs, and it was great! I want bands to be excited for their own material. Play your songs because you are excited about them, not just so that we can hear them.

I'm firmly "full album shows are bad" now. Call me old fashioned, but I like being surprised when they play a song live. I like things being different from the album. I like it being live.

So, let's give it a no, no, yes.

I Was Down in the Basement

Sometimes, all it takes for me to be a productive writer is for me to just start the process. There has to be a direct line between how my brain works while typing out a blog and how my brain work writing a paper, right? Playing the bassline to "Bro Hymn" makes me better at playing "Maxwell Murder"?

The more important thing is that I believe this to be true, so I guess it's healthy to treat IMU as an essay placebo. The friendly green confines are wonderful at taking a mish-mash of garbage that is circulating and re-circulating in my head (I'm the eye monster, Becks is Leia, Flo is Luke, and Bobo is Han) and turning it into something else. Maybe not something of value, but at least taking it out of my head and turning it into something else.

Am I getting too surreal for IMU?

Quarantine has been tough lately. Even though I'm at home all day and it feels like a weird Premature (sincerely better than Groundhog Day) of a Saturday before a week where an essay is due, I need to remember that I'm actually still in grad school full-time and am still working as a TA. Nothing has changed for me except for where I do my work. I find that others are now used to our new crazy normal where everyone is basically available all the time and have a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that I am SO busy with school right now.

This isn't something that's really bothering me, but it is something that I've noticed over the last two weeks of us all being inside. I stew over small annoyances because I can't leave the house and distact myself. Normally a bus ride or class would make me forget a petty nuisance quickly, but now I have to confront them *dun, dun, dun* head on!

While we're on the topic of being a grad student from home, something I sincerely miss is teaching my class on Fridays. It was such a nice way to end my week. Even if I had a lot of work to do, I found that my first-year tutorial would always remind me of what the good parts of academia and art history are. That learning is fun and teaching is important. I didn't get to have an IRL goodbye with my class and that makes me sad.

At the start of quarantine, one of the things I prioritized right away was an extended period of active TV watching. I immediately dove into season 1 of True Detective and hopped back onto my decade-long watch of the entirety of Cheers. With deadlines now approaching and my workload ramping up, I've ditched re-watching The Wire for the lightness of Community, which I've seen a million times. Funny how we fall into that so quickly.

Has anyone done a pysch or sociology study of the effects of Michael Schur half-hour comedies on mental health? I feel like there's a thesis in there.

While being at home, I've found that I've barely listened to any punk music, in favour of classic rock and pop music from the 60s and 70s. Do I only like to listen to punk while I walk around a city? How urban is punk music?

All this and more on the next edition of I, Musical Genius.*

*Bro, I'm not gonna talk about that.

Shine On, Shine On, Shine On

Last night Adam Schlesinger, best known as the bassist and principal songwriter of the band Fountains of Wayne, died while being treated in the hospital for COVID-19. I am a huge Fountains of Wayne fan and am pretty saddened to hear this news. Though there have been many celebrities with cases of corona, and many more deaths all over the world from the virus, Schlesinger's made all of this a lot more real for me and hit me harder than I would have expected it to.

The first that I will say is that Fountains of Wayne are way more than the one song you know them for. They've suffered from the problem that plagues seemingly every one-hit-wonder in which their silliest and poppiest song (maybe not the case here, but we'll get there) is known by everyone out of the context of the band's catalogue. "Stacy's Mom" bangs, for sure, but it's not indicative of what Fountains of Wayne is like. They were such a smart and snarky band who wrote songs in a way that no other rock band does, with a layer of hooks and rock history layered throughout every song. Since I heard the new about Schlesinger's death, I've been listening to the band nonstop. I'd really recommend you doing the same. It's such a rewarding experience.

In my mid-twenties I got heavy into power-pop music, starting with Cheap Trick and then working my way through others from the 1970s and 80s. For some reason, this style of music immediately clicked with me and it felt like this was actually the genre that I had liked for my entire life. I realized that all of my favourite songs from a wide array of bands were just their power-pop songs. Something about the unabashedly sincere pop music played on electric guitar rang extremely true to me.

I can't tell you exactly when it happened, but upon hearing "Stacy's Mom" one day, I realized that it was just a blatant Cars pastiche (one of the prominent figures in my power-pop deep dive) and that was enough for me to check out the album the song had come from. Welcome Interstate Managers was not what I was expecting, but in the best way possible. As soon as "Mexican Wine" kicked into it opening guitar lead, I knew that this was the best case scenario in looking into this record and it was hitting all the notes that I was looking for in music at time.

Beyond the 3rd/4th hammer-on, that is. (When you're writing about Schlesinger, you gotta make pop music theory puns).



The best thing about the album was that it was way more intellectual than I thought it would be. Rather than the typical themes of young love and... *checks notes, no, that's it* the songs were all self-contained stories about different characters. This carried over to the sound as well, as each song was almost like a vignette of a slightly different genre, one country, one 80s, one surf-y, etc., all being covered with a power-pop varnish.

Oddly, the album seemed to focus on characters who were travelling salesmen or middle management, which also only furthered how distinct and realized it felt. At the time, I had recently watched the movie Cedar Rapids, in which Ed Helms plays a Midwestern insurance salesman who goes out and experiences the world for the first time by travelling to an insurance conference. I couldn't help but associate the two things, and Welcome Interstate Managers kind of seemed like Cedar Rapids: The Albums. Worlds were colliding!

But this is about Adam Schlesinger, not Fountains of Wayne, though I can't imagine that the band will continue now that he has died. Schlesinger was absolutely what set the band apart from their peers and huge reason they were so different from all of the other pop-rock bands. As a good bassist who was amazing at a singing harmonies he was already the dream band member for a frontperson, but it's crazy that he would bring fully formed songs to the table too. Michael Jordan doesn't win six titles without Scottie Pippen.

Watch this video and pay attention to how much singing the guy playing bass does. Now try to think about what the song would sound like without that.



I identified with him right away because he was what I aspired to be as a musician. I never really wanted to be the frontperson of a band and I was comfortable being one of the supporting musicians. Though I wasn't the face of the band I was in, I tried my best and wanted to be an active contributor, adding as much to the sound and strength of the group as I could. Did I do much beyond play bass? No, but like I said, what Schlesinger was able to do was what I aspired and hoped to do.

Even more impressive is that his music production didn't end with Fountains of Wayne. He also played in the shoegaze-y band ivy, played in the power-pop supergroup Tinted Windows (amazing name and Bun E. Carlos on drums!), and contributed songs upon songs upon songs to movies, TV shows, and other artists. Among those, the best-known one is probably this, absolutely the best song ever written for a film:



He was an incredible talent, an all-time bass player hero, and someone whose music significantly impacted the way I approach playing guitar and bass.

Following his death, Marc Maron posted an interview he had done with Schlesinger in 2012, in which he talked about his love of power pop and mentiong doing a Kinks cover as part of a tribute compilation. I can't think of a better way to eulogize him.

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.