Sometimes, Facebooking Requires Explanation

So there's been a new application drifting around facebook over the past few weeks where you make top five lists of stuff. Normally, I'm not a fan of lists, or of liberally adding applications. Most of them are fronts for data mining, which I have nothing against per se, but can be a pain in the ass when it happens with insane frequency. But I was intrigued by the idea of listing the five albums, not that I thought were the best quality music ever, but that had the most impact on me as a person - because the internet is exclusively for telling people how awesome you are. And for porn. But that's for another time. I just put the list in my status, because I felt like it. These are albums that introduced me to sounds that I didn't think were possible before, music that expanded what I thought could be done.


Led Zeppelin II.

I never actually paid much attention to rock music until I was 14. I can't quite remember why, as most of my memories before that age have completely disappeared, phenomenally speaking. But I was an anti-social, snobbish nerd who thought he was better than everyone else around him. Puberty's first affects were not so kind to my personality. But one of those Columbia House catalogues came to my mailbox one day, and out of a random flash of curiosity, I ordered some Zeppelin. I can't even remember which Zeppelin, but I ended up ordering them all. And II was the best example of what I came to love at the time, big loud bluesy guitars that I had actually never heard before in my life. Rock wasn't just the pap that I heard on the radio in 1997; it was stirring and visceral. I had never thought of music as having this raw power before.


Unknown Pleasures

So when I was 16, I bought a mediocre book about "Alternative Rock," which was where I first learned about bands like The Velvet Underground, The Clash, The Cure, and rediscovered Nirvana. I was a little young for Nirvana when they were active. They were faces on magazines I saw in the supermarket. But of those bands whose biographies I found so intriguing, Joy Division entranced me more than any other. When I found a copy of Unknown Pleasures in a Musicworld in Montréal, I bought it, and listened to it without moving from my seat, my jaw dropped open for 45 minutes in awe at what I was hearing. I had to listen a huge number of times before I even understood what was going on. I felt like I was hearing a suicide's confession, not just in the words, but in the sounds themselves. I knew music could rock and roll, but I never knew it could terrify until now.


Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes

Even though I listed their first complete album, I linked one of my favourite songs from their latest, Dear Science. TV on the Radio, with every song I hear, make sounds the likes of which I have never been able to conceive. When I worked at the Muse, my buddy Anshuman brought in the Young Liars EP, which blew me away in a minor fashion. Then when I bought their first album, Desperate Youth Bloodthirsty Babes, I felt a blitzkrieg running through my brain. Whenever someone asks me to describe TV on the Radio's music, I call it electro-clash-doowop-rock, not because they sought to make this weird hybrid, but because that's the closest I've managed to approximate their otherworldly sounds with the English language. And I speak English very well. TV on the Radio regularly takes me to other planets and planes of existence with their music alone. It does not fit most people's understandings of the universe as a rational, ordered existence that such a band exists. I'm glad they regularly take me to theirs.


Highway 61 Revisited

Probably the most important seminal event in my discovery of rock music was when my mother took me to see Bob Dylan play St John's 2000 seat Memorial Stadium on the Time Out of Mind tour in Spring 1998. I had just turned 15, and was amazed to see what I knew to be a legend in front of me in a shiny gold jacket playing "Mr Tambourine Man." They had festival seating at the time, so I got pretty close to the stage. It was also my first significant bonding moment with Jenn Martin, who is now my oldest friend. Over the past couple of years, Bob Dylan has emerged again as an important role in my writing life, as I've actually started a writing life. His words and his images are a guide for excellence and inventiveness in my own work. There are always new ways to articulate emotions, characters, life, and Dylan shows me that whenever I listen to him.


Everything Must Go

The Manic Street Preachers should not work. They are radical, occasionally cross-dressing, socialists whose songs are visceral poems written without rhythm or rhyme about radical politics, mass murder, suicide, peppered with the occasional cover of Clash songs or "Last Xmas" by Wham!. And yet they do, utter chaos that blends one of the best singing voices of the human race, a consistently rocking guitar, and that same viscerality that first enfolded me into rock music when I was 14. I discovered the Manics when I reviewed their greatest hits collection for The Muse, just after a time when I purposely made myself a cruel, manipulative jerk solely for my personal advancement within the newspaper and in the wider university community. For the sake of my ego, I had made myself into exactly the kind of person I thought was most repugnant. And working my way through their catalogue made for an excellent dialogue partner as I spent my twentieth year re-inventing and re-considering who I was and what I wanted to be. They helped me understand that I should never stop inventing myself.

Funny Things I've Noticed Since Arriving

First, I want to inform you that the blog is not dead. I meant it when I said that I would not update as often as I used to in my old location. After all, I have priorities called a doctoral thesis and a novel. However, I've been gathering material for my writing and slowly decorating my apartment. Its formerly bare walls now sport a somewhat generic and very classic greyscale-coloured Bob Dylan poster above my writing desk in the bedroom. Young Bob stands in front of an amp plucking at a bass guitar, lips pursed in concentration and irritation. I find this image inspiring during my blocked periods at the keyboard. Next to that is a small black and white Fleet Foxes poster that came with their album that I bought a few weeks ago.



Next to my kitchen hangs a Barack Obama poster, a reproduction of the Shepard Fairey image of Obama in red white and blue. The displayed word is my favourite of Obama's campaign – hope. If he wins the election, this image I think will become a classic piece of Americana. As for my even bleaker office on campus, I bought a giant Big Lebowski poster to go next to my desk there, though the stucco-like wall surfaces are not exactly friendly to tape. I'll have to get creative to stick this up.

And perhaps inspired by Lebowski, I might also buy a rug. It could really tie my living room together.
•••
As for the material I've been gathering for my writing, I want to focus on some idiosyncratic details that I think would make funny observational points, or interesting character humour at some point. A quirk of downtown Hamilton geography is that Hess Village, the skank magnet every weekend night, is also the home of several respectable doctors' offices. And it's right next to the Freemasons' castle and lodge house. Yes, the Masons have a genuine castle here, and it's right behind my house. I pass it every day on the way to the bus stop.

There is no common space in bars here. Almost all the floor space, aside from a small area around the actual bar just big enough for people to stand in to order drinks, is taken up by tables and chairs. So when groups arrive at a bar, they sit at a table, likely are handled by a waiter, and do not interact with any other groups, because they are centred around different tables. So groups are very alienated from each other by the geography of bars in this city, with no common space where strangers can bump into each other, stand around, and interact. I've seen this in Toronto too, so it seems to be an Ontario thing. This is probably the only culture shock since I moved here – that the very geography of meeting places prevent people from meeting.

Some details related to public transit. The other day, I was waiting at the bus stop and a woman crossed the street to stand next to me. She was rather buxom, and wearing a jacket and tank top. She carried her iPod nestled in her cleavage. Describing this to my friends at the philosophy department led into a conversation about how women's clothes are made with no convenient pockets. I conclude this to be the implicit sexism of the garment industry (in addition to all the explicit sexism).

Also, there are indentations in the pavement in front of my usual bus stop caused by the constant pressure of bus after bus, tire-shaped dents in the solid asphalt road from the weight of so many buses.

Moments that Define an Entire Life

I was going to write a slightly more date-appropriate post about this on September 11, but I never had time on Thursday, so I'll be late. When those buildings actually fell down, my mind was quite literally blown. It was an inconceivable event happening right in front of me, and I was swept up in the moment. I wasn't swept up to the point where I believed what the Bush-Cheney Administration eventually said about Iraq. But there was a moment where everything I thought about politics, society, and possibly ethics changed completely.

I was watching on live television a few days after the attacks when George W was touring the rubble at Ground Zero, and he was giving a sort-of-impromptu speech through a megaphone, a series of fairly mundane platitudes that are barely memorable. A male voice shouts just loud enough for the microphones to pick it up, "We can't hear you!" George shouts back through the megaphone, "But I can hear you!" And the crowd goes wild, and I went wild. That answer was worth more all the next four years of speeches about security and safety. Those speeches showed the incredible hypocrisy of Republican policy regarding global security, and their outmoded, foolishly simplistic moral approach to the world, "Axis of Evil" concept included.

But for that one moment of connection, of calling and answering, George W Bush amazed me. For at least a few days in September 2001, I supported George W Bush because of the power of this moment. I was astounded that this idiot could understand the transformative power of this moment. That one exchange I think was the greatest point of George W's entire presidency. I don't consider it hyperbole to say that September 11 and the immediate aftermath in New York is a single event that defines me as a person more than any other.

I have since realized that George W Bush is still an idiot, still misguided as to the nature of the world, still insular, and still barely able to think. Yet he remains a fascinating character, probably the most fascinating person in American political history of at least the past hundred years. I think George W Bush the person will be the focus of mesmerized scholars, historians, students, politicians, truck drivers, bureaucrats, activists, ministers – pretty much everyone who bothers to look – for centuries. How did this drunken lout become the president of the United States of America? How did he feel being the public face of Dick Cheney's disguised dictatorship? Did he even know he was a patsy?

This is why I'm looking forward to Oliver Stone's new film, W, which seeks to tell the story. The trailer is mesmerizing, and the film looks like a genuine exploration of this man. Stone's politics veer left, and so do mine. But I don't think politics is really the driving force behind this film W. Instead, it's that question from the trailer – Why this man? Of all people?


•••
Here is a moment of pure professional jealousy. Hanging out in a hotel room are various music industry people in 1965, including Donovan and Bob Dylan. They're talking and smoking and decide to trade songs. Donovan sings one he's working on, a nice enough little song. Then Bob Dylan sings "It's All Over Now Baby Blue." You will rarely see a face that seethes with more resentment than Donovan's listening to that song follow up his own.


•••
A small update since my post last week about the St John's music scene. In an article on the AE Bridger band in the first Muse of the semester, they discuss exactly the same problem that the structure and geographical isolation of Newfoundland creates for a working musician.