(borrowed eyes, borrowed time)

ours: a sweet and vulgar torch song,
drawn out and in relief,
like the string of bones that line your back.

huddled together, bathed in ash and salt,
you:

held out my eyes so i could see
a raven's nest between the sheets.

covered my ears so i could hear
a siren blaring in the rail-yard.

cut out my tongue so i could speak
the words to sing your praise.

when old men claim that 'rust never sleeps,'
we march them down to the Calvary.

"pre-pay for gas? 'the fuck am I, a fortune teller?"

Yesterday was a rather uneventful Wedneday and I can appreciate that. My week-end was intense, to say the least, and I suppose I’m still feeling mildly exhausted from it.

As I mentioned last week, myself and a few friends drove to Atlanta over the week-end to attend the Scion Rock Fest. Atlanta is about 21 hours away if you factor in brief food/gas stops, so all in all we spent about 42 hours in my Honda Civic between Friday and Sunday. Needless to say, 4 dudes barrelling down the highway in a Civic doesn’t make for the most physically comfortable situation, so sleep was almost nil over those three days. Lack of sleep is a strange thing, as its effects can be wide-ranging and wildly incongruous. Having left Friday at lunch time, we drove straight to Georgia and got there at around 10:30 Saturday morning. We first felt the effects of the sleep deprivation at 6am on Saturday morning when we stopped at a Waffle House somewhere in North (South?) Carolina. Vince had been at the wheel since 2:30am or so, and he’d been looking forward to handing the torch over for some time. There was a consensus amongst the four of us that food was to be had, and Max and I were adamant that we go to an IHOP. So we pressured Vince to keep driving until he found said IHOP from 5am to 6am, at which point he lost patience and told us to shove it, because we were settling for Waffle House. This was a big mistake. The food at Waffle house was sub-par, to say the least. By the time we were done with our meals, all had been afflicted with horrible stomach aches and Vince had attained a near translucent pallor. The first signs of madness were settling in as well, with the four of us giggling non-stop at the sight of this grungy middle-aged lady in a trucker’s cap, bathrobe and crocs, that we had nicknamed ‘the skeleton witch.’ ‘She IS the skeleton witch,’ is the phrase that somehow sent our mind’s off the deep-end.

Somehow, we reached the venue intact (mentally + physically) and we managed to stand and watch nearly twelve hours of ridiculously delicious metal music. The highlights for me were Neurosis (who were so heavy it made your ribcage rattle inside your chest) and Baroness (who were just awesome to watch and are simply one of my favourite bands, period.)

At around midnight, we left the venue and boosted from Atlanta with thinned ranks (Brandon was getting on a flight back to Ottawa the next morning, as he had prior engagements on Sunday.) The rest of us soldiered on despite the emergent lunacy and we reached Ottawa at around 11pm on Sunday night. Again, we barely slept, despite the added comfort of an empty seat. By Sunday morning, our minds were totally gone. Our conversations mostly revolved around how Vince was an ‘archiver’ of things (as I berated him for buying a Jarritos grapefruit juice and not drinking it immediately), or about how hungry Vince was.

Sample dialogue:

JM: Yo Max, on va arrêter manger là, Vince a faim.
Max : Ah, c’est nice. Moi aussi j’ai faim.
JM : Ouin, moi aussi j’ai faim, mais est-ce qu’on peut s’entendre que Vince a faim?
Vince : Hey, fuck you d’essayer de faire passer ça sur mon dos, toi aussi t’as faim.
JM : Vince, calme-toi là. C’est pas parce que t’as faim que t’es obligé d’être impatient avec moi.

Other highlights :

- Vince corralling sea-gulls with the car in a Wal-Mart parking lot
- A terribly ambiguous ‘spirit canyon’ metaphor
- The ridiculous selection of junk food at U.S. corner stores
- The eventual IHOP meal, which was fantastic
- A gas station attendant in Virginia muttering the phrase ‘I seen possum three feet wide and two feet tall. What you hit was a possum.’
- In-car sing-alongs to Jimmy Eat World, Taking Back Sunday and assorted others

I know I’m forgetting/leaving out a bunch of things. Really, we just had a fantastic week-end, despite the lack of sleep and retarded amounts of driving. Good music and good times spent with the best of friends. I couldn’t really ask for anything better.

In other news, I start a new job on Monday. It’s still a government job, it’s in the same building I work in now and it’s part of the same ministry, but still, a new job is a new job. The new gig will probably keep me on my toes a lot more, and that’s a good thing.

Anyhow, I’m out for now. Here’s some music to consider:

- Buried Inside – Spoils of Failure
- Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
- Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest (get the leak, it’s insanely wonderful)
- Baroness – Red Album
- The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Self-titled
- Malajube - Labyrinthes
- N.A.S.A. - The Spirit of Apollo
- Mastodon - Crack the Skye

now i'm lost in oblivion

I witnessed the most peculiar thing yesterday afternoon walking home from work. Nearing my apartment in Saint-Henri, I began to notice a lot of crows flying around. This was at about 5:00pm, maybe an hour before dusk. When I reached the corner of Saint-Antoine and du Collège, which is pretty much right where I live, the sky had become nearly blackened by circling crows, their collective calls almost deafening. They sat on every inch of tree branch, every roof top, and every lamp post in a five block radius. There must’ve been at least a few thousand of them. The whole scene was slightly unnerving, partly because of the mythology associated with the animal: I mean, crows are generally creepy. It was a strange sight to see a variety of the neighbourhood’s residents gawking at the skies and rooftops, everyone looking up at the curiosity unfolding before them. It’s also funny that in a situation like this, people seem to lose their inhibitions about talking to other people they cross on the streets. People were gathering to discuss what they were seeing and trading theories as to what it could all mean. The stoner clerk from the seedy corner store seemed convinced that the flock (murder?) of crows was an ill-omen. ‘Les animaux le savent quand quelque chose de fucké s’en vient.’ Sure. There was this one woman who preferred to try and attach some religious connotation to the slew of swirling birds, it being Ash Wednesday and all. While I’m a sucker for a good supernatural story, my sceptical side usually trumps whatever impulse I might have to let my imagination run wild. A bit of research has revealed that crows have been known to flock to communal roosts at dusk in the fall and winter. What I (and the other residents of my ‘hood) witnessed last night was the gathering of crows at (what the article I read referred to as) ‘staging areas.’ These are usually located near the roost, and allow the birds to gather en masse before dusk. This pre-gathering appears to have some sort of socializing function among the birds, yet there exists no particular behavioural explanation for it, nor is it known how the social population dynamics function within the event. That’s all well and good, but the timeframe from the explanation doesn’t quite line up with late February (if the winter theory were to be believed, I would’ve seen this happen more frequently over the last few months, yet this has been an isolated occurrence.) I’m curious to see whether or not similar avian shenanigans will be afoot tonight.

Speaking of public gatherings and strange Wednesdays, I encountered a similar situation last week at pretty much the exact same spot. It was lightly snowing that evening and as I was coming home a bit after sundown, I could see that a crowd had gathered on the corner of Saint-Antoine. A fire was raging a few blocks down the street and the sight of it affected me in a rather strange way. Maybe it was an odd combination of the residual dusk light, the slight snowfall, my emotionally fragile state of mind (last Wednesday was a bad day) and the particularly potent blaze, but the whole scene was particularly surreal in quality. It’ rare that something will make me stop in my tracks (and I was in quite the rush to get home) and just affect me on that alien emotional level. To be honest, I don’t think I’d ever seen a fire like that right in front of me. I’d seen smoky buildings before and so on, but here there was an entire structure completely consumed by fire, flames licking wildly at the sky. It just looked downright dangerous, yet also carried this air of untamed elemental beauty (cheesy, but fuck, it was impressive.) Again, it’s odd that it’s been two weeks in a row that particularly odd phenomena have occurred right in the same spot, on the same day and at the same time. Whatever, there’s no need to read too much into this.

I’m pretty excited for tomorrow. I’m taking the day off from work to drive down to Atlanta, Georgia. A couple of friends and I are going to be attending the Scion Rock Fest on Saturday, which has pretty much the greatest line-up ever if you’re into the groovier, stonier end of the Metal spectrum. The full line-up includes about 30 acts, but I’m particularly excited to see Mastodon, Neurosis, High on Fire, Boris, Converge, Torche and Baroness. I don’t listen to that much ‘metal’ anymore, but all of those bands are near the top of my favourite lists for any genre. I mean, fucking Neurosis! Come on! Needless to say, I am beyond stoked. I’d been itching for a good road trip for a while, so to be sharing a car with my band mates for nearly 40 hours over three days should be more than satisfactory. It’ll be like touring, minus the playing shows bit.

Oh and on a semi-related note, for those who might be interested, City of a Hundred Spires will be playing with Malajube in Ottawa at Babylon on March 13th. The show is 15$. Malajube’s new album is pretty good, so we’re pretty excited to be sharing the stage with them.

Ok that’s quite enough. I need to get a bit of work done. Hugs.

the space between words

I think this might be the longest I’ve ever gone without writing a blog post, and we all know that I am certainly not a beacon of regularity when it comes to such things… or anything for that matter.

My exile from the internet world has been paralleled by a general exile from most other things in my life. Back in October, having recently graduated from University, I quit my then government job and tried my hand at aimless wandering/traveling. I quickly came to realize that I wasn’t in the right mindset to undertake something like that by myself and I shortly found refuge back home. I spent a few disillusioned/depressed weeks on the couch playing my new playstation (the result of a depression-fuelled compulsive purchasing spree), eventually (partly) coming to my senses and getting a new apartment in Montreal’s St-Henri neighbourhood. Things since then have been neither good nor bad, though I can’t say I’ve been working on removing myself from whatever quarter-life crisis hole I dug myself into. I’d very much like to pull myself together, yet I’m quite aware that there exists no miracle cure for such things, just small steps. This is a small step.

Over the last few months I’ve isolated myself from a great deal of people and burnt an inordinate number of bridges. I’ve lost touch with many good friends and strained many of my most important relationships. I am difficult, inconsistent and often impenetrable. This is an admittedly limited attempt at opening up (as well as a chance to write more, and I certainly need to write more.)

I am still working a (semi-)miserable civil servant job, but I suppose the lax work environment will allow me to write on a more regular basis. I’m doing this until I come across something more suitable to my tastes and aspirations, as a journalism degree definitely DOES NOT guarantee a journalism job.

I’ll also try to update this page with a weekly picture, seeing as writing isn’t the only one of my hobbies that I’ve been neglecting on my path to mediocrity. I just picked up Tom Ang’s newish book Fundamentals of Photography last week, and I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit. I would recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in photography. The book’s approach is particularly interesting in that it attempts to reconcile film and digital photography. It examines methods of blending both mediums for the most effective and artistic practice. The book’s layout is also particularly lovely.

I came across this Adbusters article today that I found fairly interesting. It expressed a lot of the observations I've come to make over the years about so-called 'hipster' culture, yet goes further to posit that "The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new. " The writer's primary argument centers around the assertion that 'hipster' is a counterculture stripped of its subversive element, devoid of radical agenda and therefore wholly unoriginal, self-indulgent and self-perpetuating. I'd argue that 'hipster' was never intended to be a counterculture, and that since its inception it has been merely one of the many subcultures jutting out from the mainstream consumer infrastructure. It operates and thrives on product. It is a peculiar permutation of the same consumerism that drives the upper middle-class; and what's more, it is wholly conscious of this reality. 'Hipster' is not borne from a reactionary spark, it does not operate against an established structure, it is merely a hyper-modern, youth targetting stem of mass-market culture that is actualized by its own sense of self-awareness. To label it a counterculture is to give it too much credit. 'Hipster' culture is not subversive and it never claimed to be. Really, I suppose a similar point is made in that article, but the writer's rhetoric is just jumbled and pointless. Its melodrama and overimportant rambling are actually characteristic of the subculture it attempts to lampoon. But I suppose that might be exactly the type of pretentious post-modern statement the writers at Adbusters are attempting to make. Whatever.

I guess I'm done here for now. Evenin'.

congratulations on the mess you made of things

It's nearly 6am and I am in Boston. I spent the day here yesterday, though it was an odd one. Walked around the Harvard and MIT campuses, saw a movie, chased train tracks. I barely slept. It was warm enough for me to forego the sleeping bag, but I never could find a comfortable position. This is something I must somehow remedy, and sooner rather than later. I think I'm a bit hungry.

People here make me feel dumb for using the Courier font and for knowing very little about AIDS in sub-saharan African. At least I don't wear purple dress shirts with navy blue ties. Fucker.

I'm debating whether to recline it out until the sun rises or simply hit the road right now. Boston is nice but I feel like I should keep going. Why is that? What is it that's dragging me along? What am I chasing? What do I expect/hope to find?

I did find a cheap pair of checkered Airwalk slip-ons at Payless here yesterday, but I didn't get them. Maybe I should wait til the store opens and go buy them. These Eras are falling apart. I should also invest in some wool socks.

Things I learnt today/yesterday:

- F1 grade car wax makes my car look shiny again

- everybody in this city is smarter than I am

- everybody in this city has more ambition, drive and potential than i will ever have

- rachel getting married is a really good movie

- in my memories, cities are sparsely populated, the roads are devoid of cars/traffic and every street is a narrow one

- i have very little will to purchase things when i can't immediately use them

word of the day: 

ah fuck it, my battery is nearly dead.. no time for word of the day.

peace.

she drinks her salty dog, talking about the sound of the waves.

It's 10pm or so and I'm typing up a blog entry from a rest area parking lot somewhere in Vermont. The last few days (and more specifically, the last few hours) have been interesting, emotional, horrifying, exciting and most certainly complex. Byzantine even. Whatever. 

So I guess I left home yesterday afternoon at some point, but that's only a half-truth. The first leg of my adventure (one that will hopefully be millipede-esque) took me to Montreal, so in all fairness I didn't really leave 'home' until this evening. I saw a few friends that I hadn't seen in a while (which was very nice) and tried to hang on for dear life to any sort of familiarity I could get my hands on. The disconnect happened the moment I parted ways with a really good friend of mine some time this afternoon. It was the oddest thing to be fully aware that that was the last direct contact with familiarity I would have for (at the very least) the next month. 

Argh. My mind is a scramble. There are so many ideas buzzing in my head right now that I can't make sense of any of them. One thing is certain, I haven't felt this way in a while. Maybe ever.

It's funny that the border guard chose to criticize my lack of any tangible assets. Apparently, given my story, the dude was suspicious that I might be simply fleeing Canada and heading South, never to return. So he tried to have me list items/things/relationships that I might have back home that would, you know, tie me to the place and therefore prove that I was planning on heading back..

"So do you own or rent housing?"

"Well, my permanent address is at home with my parents.. and right now, I live in my grandparents' basement."

"Where do you work?"

"Umm. I don't have a job right now, I quit a few days ago."

"Are you in school?"

"Well not right now, I graduated over the summer."

"Girlfriend or significant other back home?"

"Nah."

"Is this car yours?"

"Well, technically it is.. but my mom has the ownership."

"I see. You know 'guy', you really need to get some assets."

Shucks, thanks buddy. As if I didn't already feel inadequate 90% of the time.

Bed time? Bed time.

Word of the Day: Byzantine

Notes: 

- bridges freeze before roads apparently. duh.

- cars and roman candles

- my mind is like a sieve. let's work on that.

Golgotha - The Place of the Skull

I find my misfortune to be highly amusing sometimes. For example, who would have thought that something as innocent as going to Chapters to buy children's books would result in Vince and I getting sprayed with piss? I certainly didn't. So get this. We were walking down George Street heading towards the Chapters on the corner of Rideau and Sussex, when all of a sudden this abhorrent smell found its way into my nasal passages. It was a vile smell, the kind you would imagine attached to something being dredged up from the recesses of hell. With hand over mouth, I scanned the area to determine the source of the foul. I read 'City of Ottawa Sewage Waste' on the side of a truck, and then it hit me, quite literally. I felt moist misty speckles of something hit my skin and the smell got worse. A rather large exhaust fan on the back of the 'Sewage Waste' truck was spraying the environs with a rank fog that was no doubt a mixture of piss, excrement, toilet paper bits, vomit and beer. Awesome. Vince and I ran out of the thick as quickly as we could, but we hadn't been spared. We smelled our clothing and our skin and came to grips with the abomination we'd just been faced with. The City of Ottawa had just doused us with piss and shit. Needless to say, buying children's books for my co-worker's teaching trip to India was an unpleasant and embarassing affair: unpleasant for the clerks dealing with me and for the other customers in Chapters, embarassing for Vince and myself, who smelled like we'd just crawled out of a toilet bowl. The only positive thing I learnt from the entire situation was that Febreeze gets the smell of piss out rather nicely.

Fuck you, City of Ottawa. You win this round, but I won't be around long enough for you to piss on me again.

Campfire Kansas

I like the Get Up Kids. I really do. Yesterday, I was droning away in my office (yes, I have an office.. more on that in a bit) and Campfire Kansas came on my iPod's shuffle play. I was reminded that not only is that a wonderful song, but that right now, in the (hopefully not that linear) vector that is my life, this is not where I want to be.

So I graduated. For real. Well actually, not quite for real. I still need to go through the whole convocation ceremony process, but as far as requirements, classes and procedures are concerned, I'm good to go. I will soon be holder of a B.A. in Journalism, for whatever that's worth.

I also moved.I’m now living in the Outaouais region in a nice little apartment by the river, conveniently located in my grandparents’ basement. The rent is cheap (read: free) and the location is fairly convenient, allowing me easy access to anything of note in the National Capital region, all while giving me the opportunity to bike to work every day. This brings us to the aforementioned office. Through a combination of luck and the benevolence of certain family members, I got offered a casual position working for Service Canada. Yes, I’ve become a government worker. I partake in the 8 to 4 grind here and in the evenings I rule with an iron fist at the Freshmart, my father’s grocery store in lovely Chelsea Quebec. Needless to say, this keeps me rather busy.

And all of this for what? Have I grown to dislike Montreal? Am I willing to stand up on my desk, gazing down at all on the other side of my cubicle walls and proclaim “to hell with journalism, I am a public servant!”? I’m happy to say that both of the above hypotheses are complete folly.

No, the reality of it is that I need money. Living the student life has left me with some considerable debt that I need to take care of a.s.a.p. I’ve been fortunate enough to be presented with a situation that allows me to work extensively (for very decent pay) and absolves me of virtually any cost of living. Not to take of advantage of it would be downright stupid.

Yet despite the practicality of it all, I’m horribly dissatisfied. I now find myself living for my week-ends, anxiously awaiting the next two day respite before it all starts over again. I feel like I’ve gone off the rails and have gradually lost sight of what I was working towards. In the last few days, I’ve been questioning my motives for moving back here, for taking this monetarily fruitful, yet spiritually, emotionally and intellectually bankrupt detour. As much as I try to remind myself of the reason for it all, I’m just not convinced anymore. I feel cheated out of what should be a really exciting time in my life.

The only positive aspect I’ve been able to wrangle out of all of this has been a definition of ‘home’. Since I first moved to Montreal three years ago, I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to define that term. But now that I’ve moved back to the Outaouais region, a new kind of perspective has emerged. I’m here to debunk the theory of ‘home is where the heart is,’ at least in my own narrowly biased view of things. I’m living in a place where a great deal of the people I love most reside, yet I can’t help but feel alien and displaced. ‘Home’ is a feeling, this much is certain, but I believe it to be one that implies synergy and communion between a person and his surroundings rather than between a person and those he interacts with. On Sunday morning, I walked the streets of Montreal under the beating of heavy rain fall and I felt peaceful. The city spoke to me, offered me comfort, consoled my loneliness and granted me my very own tract of significance and purpose amidst its rumblings and shakings. Leaving the city in the afternoon, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I’d return and take the place that is offered to me. I miss 'home.'

I'm also having some trouble coming to grips with certain elements of change. It is obvious that very few things can be qualified as constant, even though we often have the audacity of labeling them as such. I'm finding myself being estranged from things I held to dearly, and the process has been a difficult one. Change breeds distance it seems. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want it to breed proximity.

So back to Campfire Kansas. I've always had this little ideal of the perfect Summer and the Get Up Kids just totally nailed that state/feeling with this song. I wish all my summer evenings were spent lying down by a river with a good book, my head propped up against some rough tree bark, the whole scene tinted a sepia orange, everything drowned in the warm evening light. Every year, I cross my fingers and hope that this will be the one where I manage to approximate my ideal. Needless to say, I'm always let down. I need to learn to make the most of anything, I guess that's what the song's about.

That's quite enough for now. Once I figure things out, you'll hear from me again. But really, I'd like to hear from you.

So Many People

We interrupt your regularly programmed bitching about girls for a slight change of pace.  I want to talk about music.  You know 'music' ? Yep that's right, those marvelous vibrations and oscillations occurring at varying frequencies and sequenced in such a way as to evoke all kinds of reactions in those hearing/perceiving them.  I love music.  You few that know me know that I love music.  Why then do I write about dour shit all of time and not about the things that bring me great joy (hint: music) ?  Oh, who knows.  What I do know is that this post is entirely dedicated to music, no compromise.

Where do I start?  So I've been privy to hearing a pair of as yet unreleased and highly anticipated records over the last week.  The albums in question are Sigur Ros'(I'm aware of the accents, I just don't care to replicate them) Með Suð í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust and Coldplay's Viva La Vida (or Death and All his Friends). I've been listening to both of these all week and have been enjoying them quite a bit.  The Sigur Ros album, at least with it's first few songs, presents itself as a considerably warmer and more organic affair than what their back catalogue would suggest.  Earthy, playful melodies pour out of songs showcasing surprisingly (for the band) concise and restrained composition.  The band is back to its old tricks by the half-way point however, with 'Festival' 's lengthy dirge steering the album's second half into much darker territory.  It should be noted that the set's closer, 'All Alright', is sung in what appears to be english.  What's more is that the track might very well be one of the most stirring and heartbreaking tunes the band has put together.  The hushed, barely mumbled vocals and the shy, almost hesitant piano chords create a mood of desolation, shame and despair.  I remember a part in Radiohead's Meeting People is Easy where a journalist describes Ok Computer's 'Lucky' as "music to slit your wrists to."  If any song was ever worthy of such a statement, 'All Alright' would be it.  Anyhow, good record.

And what about the new Coldplay?  I feel sort of silly writing about something that will be written about ad nauseam for the coming years, but here goes anyway.  Simply, it's good, polite, inoffensive, fun and slightly experimental rock music.  It showcases the most interesting song writing of Coldplay's career, not to mention some of Christ Martin's better lyrics.  The band isn't breaking any new ground or even making genuinely great music, but really it's just so damn easy to enjoy. My biggest complaints with the album lie with a few failed attempts at 'adventurous' song writing (i.e. the poorly executed transitions that segue the jarringly incompatible sections of '42') and a few ideas that just come off as blatantly derivative (i.e. the My Bloody Valentine/Slowdive aping of hidden track 'Chinese Sleep Chant', the textured post-rock of opener 'Life in Technicolor', the post-punk rhythms that close off 'Death and All his Friends', the middle-eastern folk strings of 'Yes') But you know, here I am complaining like a critic, yet I've been listening constantly since Monday.  All I'm trying to get at is that if Coldplay manages to work on their song writing and arranging skills, all while finding ways of incorporating their influences into their own sound, they'd become a great band instead of a really good one.

What else?  I just heard the new Beck single a few minutes ago and upon first listen it struck me as tremendous.  Really tremendous.  Chemtrails is a blisteringly concise psych/baroque pop number with drums and bass that absolutely lay everything to waste. I'm now excited for Modern Guilt.

Finally, Mogwai is putting out a new album in September called The Hawk is Howling. The album will be preceded by the Batcat EP, Batcat being the title of the album's first single.  Below is a video of the mighty scots performing said song live.  If this is any indication of what the album will be like, I think we should all be looking forward to it.

And I guess that's it.  I'll update this with more personal details soon I guess. Yay, music.

5- 90% Of My Mind Is With You

For the past few days I've been struggling with my unhealthy habit of over-analyzing the fabric of my everyday.  I've been dissecting things to pieces, restructuring those pieces over and over, and trying to find some semblance of sense or purpose to events/occurrences that most would find rather mundane.  I've been building and destroying hypotheses at an astronomical rate.  Every time it seems I've settled on an interpretation or perception of a certain situation, something (often times the most seemingly insignificant of details) comes and shakes the very foundation of my resolve.  And then it crumbles and I'm thrust back into doubt.

I tried to run with the idea above but then realized that I can't/shouldn't/won't.  I can't take such thoughts to any logical conclusion and those first few lines make it painfully obvious.  

I watched Into the Wild last night, which is Sean Penn's film adaptation of the book by Krakauer.  The movie left me with the strangest of feelings.  There you have a story which essentially embodies themes that I've been thinking (and dreaming) a whole lot about for the last while, yet I couldn't help but be consumed by a feeling of intense melancholy while watching it.  I was overcome by this implacable sense of loneliness and this feeling was only exacerbated by my walk home after the movie.  Even today, I still feel strangely blank about it.  I thought I'd be able to properly articulate my thoughts, but it seems that I've failed.  Oh well.

The story ends on a cautionary note.  It speaks of the necessity of sharing love and experiences with others; that happiness is bred by offering that which most keep in themselves to those they love most.  I think that such a simple and obvious sentiment is what touched me most, yet for some reason it's something I feel distanced from.

Again, oh well.

  

Little Engines

We made claims to proximity.  Borne from stubborn ideals and our reactive natures, we're reminded of them every time familiarity strays; every moment we struggle to hear each other's voice over the mumblings of a crowd, over the roar of every engine that has ever taken us between two points (sometimes and back.)  Silhouettes left on the stubborn plastic of subway seats and cast by hands gripping the frayed ends of metal fences tell a different story; one where the cracks grow wider the longer they're left untended and where cuts on dry skin take weeks to heal. Backlit by the glow of drifting headlights, you'll look away and I'll struggle to make out your features reflected in the passenger side window.  The inheritance you left me with, I'll divide up between my failures.  And through it all, I'll still blame you when my extremities get cold; when my coughing awakens lovers in the next room; when difficult friendships are far beyond mending.  

Everything under the sun rests between our shoulders, this I now know.  

I Lost My Lights

It was shortly after 8pm on an early September Sunday when I arrived at Coney Island. The sun had begun to set and all the buildings lining Ocean Avenue were bathed in that warm orange glow that would soon give way to twilight. I’d spent a weekend visiting New York City, taking in its sights and sounds, its energy, and a visit to this iconic Brooklyn neighborhood was to be the culmination of my trip.

Earlier in the evening I’d left Manhattan, crossing the Williamsburgh Bridge into Brooklyn with the Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds blaring on my car stereo. All of the bridge’s lanes were tied up in traffic and commuters were getting tense. Brian Wilson’s brilliantly gentle pop arrangements stood in sharp contrast to the cursing, angry snarls, angrier hand gestures and deafening car horns erupting just outside the window.

With the bridge behind me, I found myself on the northern-most part of the Brooklyn peninsula, with Coney Island lying at its southern tip. Southbound, I drove through Adelphi, South Brooklyn, Flatbush, Kensington. I passed Prospect Park, Greenwood Cemetery, various Laundromats, pizza parlors, used electronics stores and broken down pawn shops. All of them were distinct, colorful and alive; the city brimming with kinetic energy on this late summer evening.

I scanned the FM airwaves on my car’s radio in order to find some music for my southbound drive. A few flicks of the dial later, loud reggae tunes emerged from the speakers. The syncopated guitar clicks, bursts of Caribbean-inflected organ tones and a dub-style bass and drum groove provided a suitably sunny soundtrack. The radio DJ would intermittently cut through the mix with loud chants of “All islands under one nation!” The passion in his voice was enough to single-handedly ignite a Caribbean revolution. The mix of chilled tunes and the host’s fiery reclamations were an odd mix, yet I found myself strangely enthralled.

Shortly before arriving in Coney Island, I drove through Brighton beach, a neighborhood just east of my destination. Brighton Beach is particularly distinct because of its considerable Russian community. A bustling Russian marketplace lay below elevated subway lines. Hot pink, baby blue, electric green and mellow yellow neon signs, all of them sporting an unfamiliar alphabet, evoked an eerily dreamlike yet noticeably fading version of the glory found in Soviet propaganda movies from the 80s.  

I stopped for a moment to ask for directions away from this bright, buzzing chaos and towards my destination. A balding middle-aged man with a thick Russian accent gladly provided me with the information I needed. I was mere minutes away.

I turned the radio dial again, settling on a station airing a retrospective tribute to Sly and the Family Stone. Sly’s smooth funk and soul was to accompany me on the last leg of my trek. The titular chorus to “You Can Make It If You Try” echoed through my speakers and given the unfamiliarity of the surroundings, those words were reassuring.

I rolled into Coney Island to the bombastic fanfare of the Family Stone’s brass section. The neighborhood’s architecture, its landmarks, its streets, they all bear the mark of faded glory. Much of the infrastructure, not to mention the iconic amusement park that many associate it with, was built during the 1920s as a symbol of the Jazz Age and its economic and cultural prosperity. What remains now is something of a derelict husk of that era. ‘For sale’ signs hang over the rusty metal shutters of various disaffected buildings, the streets are littered with beer cans and empty buckets of paint, the streetlights and electric shop signs are dying out, and through it all, Deno’s Wonderwheel spins on in the distance.

All of the subway lines leading to Coney Island converge at Stillwell avenue station. I had parked my car about a block away and walking by, I looked up to see a shiny metal train car arriving on the elevated tracks. Lit by the late evening sun and given a bright orange tint, the station and the arriving transport had an air of displaced modernity, like something you’d find in 1950s accounts of what the future would look like. Up ahead lied Coney Island’s iconic boardwalk: the neighborhood’s prime attraction and the main object of my curiosity.

The boardwalk along the beach was lined with a series of abandoned old buildings. I couldn’t help but think of the one-street shantytowns found in old Sergio Leone western movies. The windows were boarded up, the wooden sidings were stained, chipped and rotting and it seemed that no one had set food inside the shacks in decades. Overlooking the ghost town lay a few gigantic red sky-reaching towers, casting their elongated shadows on the miniscule houses below. The towers evoked gigantic antennas that had once been used to send important transmissions to far off places, but that now found themselves abandoned and useless: a testament to ideals long forgotten.

I reached the beach just as the sun was setting. Its brilliant orange light was ablaze at the exact point where the sky meets the sea. Filaments of yellow, red and orange streamed from that point, stretching across the blue-grey sky. The tide rolled-in violently with pitch-black waves collapsing onto the beach, alternately covering and then revealing the littered sandbank.

That night, even the beach seemed abandoned. A child’s yellow plastic bucket lay turned over in the sand. The air was nearly silent except for the variety of faint cartoonish noises emerging from the nearby amusement park. I stood in the surf for a moment, snapping pictures and taking in the scenery. As the light got too dim for my camera film’s speed to accommodate, I made my way back.

I left Coney Island to the tune of John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk’s collaboration recorded at Carnegie Hall. The tapes of that performance had been lost for nearly 50 years before they were unearthed and published. Much like that forgotten jazz energy was finally revealing itself through my speakers, Coney Island’s age-old wonders had been manifest that night.

4- You've Got To Remember Every Little Thing

I always forget how much I love early mornings.  A good night's sleep allowed me to wake and part the curtains at 8am today, letting in a wash of early morning sunlight.  Delightful.  Last night was Montréal's infamous "nuit blanche," where the city doesn't sleep and instead offers up a variety of cultural events.  So, of course, I chose such a night to wind up alone at home with nothing much to do.  Oh well, I needed the sleep I suppose.

I feel like I owe this blog my apologies. It seems that I've been mistreating it; using it as some vain exercise in finding increasingly fancy ways of saying I feel like shit. There's very little to be gained in doing such a thing, so I should try to reign in those sentiments. My apologies.

A few weeks ago, I read Ryszard Kapuscinski's Shah of Shahs and was deeply enthralled. The book is a journalistic account of the fall of the last Shah of Iran, but it's the humanity and insight in Kapuscinski's writing that gives it its colours. The writer was in Tehran during the events depicted, making for highly personal and focused storytelling. It touches on themes of fear, power relationships, revolution, the disillusionment that often follows revolutions and, most importantly, it examines human nature at a macroscopic level. There's a passage where Kapuscinski examines the precise moment when a revolution is sparked, detailing the intimate changes in composition that occur between the oppressive and the oppressed. I got chills while reading that bit, so I'm going to reproduce a part of it here.

"Now the most important moment, the moment that will determine the fate of the country, the Shah, and the revolution, is the moment when one policeman walks from his post toward one man on the edge of the crowd, raises his voice, and orders the man to go home. The policeman and the man on the edge of the crowd are ordinary, anonymous people, but their meeting has historic significance. They are both adults, they have both lived through certain events, they have both had their individual experiences. The policeman's experience: If I shout at someone and raise my truncheon, he will first go numb with terror and then take to his heels. The experience of the man at the edge of the crowd: At the sight of an approaching policeman I am seized by fear and start running. On the basis of these experiences we can elaborate a scenario: The policeman shouts, the man runs, others take flight, the square empties. But this time everything turns out differently. The policeman shouts, but the man doesn't run. He just stands there, looking at the policeman. It's a cautious look, still tinged with fear, but at the same time tough and insolent. So that's the way it is! The man on the edge of the crowd is looking insolently at uniformed authority. He doesn't budge. He glances around and sees the same look on other faces. Like his, their faces are watchful, still a bit fearful, but already firm and unrelenting. Nobody runs though the policeman has gone on shouting; at last he stops. There is a moment of silence. We don't know whether the policeman and the man on the edge of the crowd already realize what has happened. The man has stopped being afraid- and this is precisely the beginning of the revolution. Here it starts. Until now, whenever these two men approached each other, a third figure instantly intervened between them. That third figure was fear. Fear was the policeman's ally and the man in the crowd's foe. Fear interposed its rules and decided everything. Now the two men find themselves alone, facing each other, and fear has disappeared into thin air. Until now their relationship was charged with emotion, a mixture of aggression, scorn, rage, terror. But now that fear has retreated, this perverse, hateful union has suddenly broken up; something has been extinguished. The two men have now grown mutually indifferent, useless to each other; they can go their own ways. Accordingly, the policeman turns around and begins to walk heavily back toward his post, while the man on the edge of the crowd stands there looking at his vanishing enemy."

(from KAPUSCINSKI, Shah of Shahs)

Writing like this is precisely why I found myself interested in good journalism in the first place and it's also something I very much aspire to.

I believe it's somewhat fitting that I'm posting and talking about someone else's art today, as my own creative output has been seemingly cut down in its tracks.  My band City of a Hundred Spires has been one of, if not the, most important thing in my life for the past five years and now I can't help but be a bit disillusioned about it.  Things aren't quite going marvelously in the COAHS camp for a variety of reasons, both internal and external, and I find it all rather discouraging.  Maybe things will mend themselves but it is indeed crushing to realize that I now feel as though we're back to square one in a few senses.  There's ultimately no point in writing about this here as I obviously don't feel up to discussing the minute details of the problems, so I'll just drop it.

I managed to swoop by the cinemas on Friday night to catch Be Kind Rewind.  I really can't understand why it's been receiving such negative press.  Sure, thematically and in terms of emotional depth, it has nothing in common with Gondry's previous films, but in terms of the director's wide-eyed wonder with the medium of filmmaking, not to mention his truly unique and endearing sense of imagination, Be Kind Rewind is a success.  Simply, it's a kids story for adults.  You'd have to be truly cold-hearted not to smile or feel warmed up by the movie's end. But then again, who am I to make judgment calls on you.  Go see it for yourself. 

Also, here are a fews points regarding last week's Oscars ceremony:

- Generally, boring as all hell (how did this expression come into being?  Hell should be anything but boring.)

- Daniel Day-Lewis' win was well deserved.  This made me happy.

- Those Once kids winning for Best Song was kinda cute.

- Paul Thomas Anderson got robbed.  He should've won both Best Picture (There Will Be Blood) and Best Director (for said movie.)

- Jon Stewart was generally funny.  Of particular note was his shout out to Dennis Hopper.  "Just letting him know where he is."  Hilarious.

- Roger Deakins should have won the Best Cinematography Oscar for The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford.  That is the most strikingly beautiful photography I've seen in movies in a long time.  

- In a similar vein, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' score for the above-mentioned movie should have been nominated for Best Score.  Shame.

Wonderful, it's only 10am and I have a beautiful day ahead of me.  Let's make the best of it.  Cheers.

Music: 

- J. Tillman - Cancer & Delirium

- Frodus - ...And We Washed Our Weapons in the Sea

- Blonde Redhead - 23

3- Here We Go, Hold On Tight and Don't Let Go

It stopped snowing minutes ago and I'm thankful. I don't know how much more of the snowy onslaught I could've endured. Today is one of those days where just about nothing makes sense. I feel like I'm barely a person lately: stripped of my self-esteem, my focus, my wit; devoid of stories to tell, of things to love and of small victories. Sure, I still have the broad strokes in front of me. I still know what I want to achieve and I still have the ambition necessary to get there. But the lines I'd drawn in the sand to lead me to that goal have been erased. The fall is coming so quickly and I'm not sure how I'll manage to have all of my shit together by then. I'm a terrible mess. I want to leave and cut myself off from all that is familiar. I hate to be buying into that age-old 'finding yourself' cliché, but I certainly have trouble locating myself in any semblance of a coherent way lately. There's no purpose or mystery to anything I do and this discourse is redundant. Oh, shush already.

2- Some Hearts Are True

I walked home this morning just as the sun was rising. Montreal was still asleep and the air was cold and dry. For the first time this winter, I felt my beard crisp up because of the cold. I was listening to the new A Silver Mount Zion record at deafening volumes and was just overwhelmed by its beauty. As the chants at the end of BlindBlindBlind (the album's closer) receded, I had to stop and compose myself. I hadn't felt as emotionally tempered by a piece of music in quite a long time. "Some hearts are true" indeed.

1 - What honest words can't you afford to say?

Oh, sweet focus where have you gone? I think I have completely lost my ability to get any work done without being distracted by an infinite number of things. It's not that I don't want to get things done, but I'm starting to feel that I don't know how! Frightening. I have a week off coming up, so consequently this week promises to be pure hell, with a variety of hurdles that will necessitate overcoming. I suppose I will resort to the tried (and maybe not so true) method of making a list of things that I need to accomplish before the week is out. I need to put things into perspective (how many times have I typed that into this box before?) and figure out ways of motivating myself.

SO.. LIST!

Things to do:

1) Finishing considerably late paper for Globalization class. Due: ASAP
2) Studying for History exam... i.e. catching up on all the readings I haven't done. Due: Tuesday night at 6pm
3) Finishing John Hersey's Hiroshima (3 chapters left.) Due: Wednesday morning
4) Practicing for Music for Dummies exam. Due: Thursday morning
5) Writing final draft of my Coney Island piece for Literary Non-Fiction class. Due: Friday (read: Thursday before 6pm)
6) Shoveling the snow in the alleyway and getting my car out of there. Due: Thursday before 6pm
7) Eating. Due: Every day
8) Staying sane. Due: Every other day

Things to look forward to:

1) Graveyard of Ships mixes by week's end
2) City of a Hundred Spires band practice on Thursday (fuck you Valentine's day)
3) Thrice show on Saturday
4) Hang outs
5) Movie watching
6) Photo adventures
7) Reading
8) Lost
9) Autumn

Okay. We have perspective. We have an outline clearly laid out in front of us. Bloodshot eyes, cold feet and colder hands are not an excuse. By the end of tonight I have to scratch at least one element off of the top list. Here we go.

There Will Be Blood

As the lights slowly dimmed and then died out, she slouched in her red velvet seat, arms tightly crossed, her gaze straight ahead. Her inappropriate posture betrayed her considerable height; she was a fairly tall girl, standing at around five feet, eight inches.

The brightly lit barren desert mountains that appeared before her made her squint, her pupils contracting, adjusting to the dramatic increase in light. The wash of ivory made her already pale complexion even fainter, her appearance now bordering on ghostly. An uncomfortable grin drew itself across her face as violins, violas and cellos struck discordant sixteenth notes at an unrelenting pace, establishing an eerily contrasting soundtrack to the static yet serene scenery before her.

As time went on, she sunk deeper into her seat, her shoulders eventually resting well below mine. A blaze raged before us in the nighttime desert sky, the reds, oranges and yellows tinting her cheeks and forehead. Her eyes drifted away from the spectacle, momentarily meeting mine. Her shy smile acknowledged my inquisitive glance. I could do nothing but smile back.

Loud yelling erupted and she sprung up, her back hunched and leaning forward, teetering precariously on the edge of her seat. Two men clashed in an old two-lane bowling alley. They stomped about the room, one of them angrily shouting as the other recoiled in horror. Her lips curled up, forming a slight grin on her face. The expression was hesitant; she knew full well that the event unfolding before her was one of violence and depravity, and that smiles were inappropriate. As the violence reached its peak, there was blood. She sat silent, wide-eyed.

“I’m finished,” cried out the survivor. A Brahms-penned classical piece was heard as the credits rolled.

*this was an exercise in description for a literary non-fiction class

Orange, Green, Yellow, Blue

I won’t give you a call when I get back into town. I will cover up the tracks that lead to my doorstep, pull blinds across the apartment windows, make myself naïvely unobvious and certainly inaccessible. The phone will ring until its final chime, a stiff sounding lady will interject and you’ll hang up. You might try your hand at it again later or in a few days, but I will win and you will give up. The hours will slip, the days will slide, and the weeks will fade. Locks will freeze up, snow will fill in the stairwell and ice will blanket and stain glass panes. In the glow of sunlight filtered through shattered patterns and irregular shapes I will wait, wait for you to break your word and call again.

Shipping Station

I laughed an uneasy laugh as humorous anecdotes got thrown around the room. My ignorance, no, my indifference to the topic of conversation making itself quite obvious. I find it puzzling that through supposed nonchalance to a situation, I still found myself feeling minuscule; a fly on the wall, the kid hiding beneath the table listening in on his parents, a ghost at the party. All eyes on you, your eyes on all but me. We broke the tension through colored blocks. The obviously limitless possibilities afforded by such materials offset by the alarmingly constricted set of choices I'm now left with. A blooming flower, a lit fuse; to walk away or to listen?

A ride down the Main, picking up speed, the cool night wind pinching my cheeks. Grateful for this sweater over my shoulders, annoyed at the drunks yelling at a passing taxi, anxious for the empty streets ahead. Passed through cobblestone roads, beneath highway overpasses, by dwellings either new or old. Trucks at the brewery loading up for their late night deliveries, the smell of fermenting yeast, of barley malt meshing with hops. A sprawling bridge to the South Shore, a decaying piece of heritage at its foot, a mangled coat hanger on the way out. My heart beating faster, my tonsils pulsing, the blood rushing to my head. By docked boats, by converging rails, the way out is up the Main.

It's a shame you'll never know what I told those silent walkways, those inviting dockyards, that unfortunately abandoned shipping station.

Cartoons + Hockey + Civic Pride = Looting

I grew up on television. The tube was an ever present entity in our household and without it I firmly believe that I would not have the ease with the English language that I now possess. I guess I have Big Bird, Count Duckula and Mr. Dress-Up to thank for my bilinguilism. What a strange thing.

I recall loving morning cartoons. I'd get up as bright and early as I could, which usually meant a short while before 6 am, and I'd watch my favorite shows all the way til noon hour if I could. Would it stop there? Of course not! I'd record that colossal 6 hours of goodness to VHS tape and give it another watch come evening, skipping over the not so good parts. Those were the days.

Since moving out of my parents' house, television has been filtered out of my daily routine. On the one hand, my interest in the thing had waned over the years as nothing managed to capture my attention like the cartoons of old, and on the other, a modest studetn's salary makes it rather difficult to afford cable. Lack of cable makes for lack of quality programming, but that goes without saying. As of now, I can tune into Radio Canada with a minmal amount of static, and the CBC with a considerably large amout of weird shadows, fuzz and wobbly lines. Nothing more.

So this brings us to this evening. I imagine you're all wondering what purpose this abnormally long diatribe about television has. It's Saturday night in Montreal and I find myself considerably bored, the result of being a jerk who alienates any new friends I make all too easily. I recalled that it was NHL playoff time, so I decided I'd try to see if I could tune in to the game on one of my two channels. Luckily, the CBC provided and I now find myself strangely enthralled.

Along with my interest in television, I somehow lost my interest in hockey over as I grew up. As any good Quebec boy, I played hockey for a brief while as a kid. My dad really wanted it, he even went as far as being assistant coach for a while. Unfortuntaely, my laziness (remember my obsession with cartoons?), my flat feet and my fate as a chubby kid all contributed to make me a pretty shoddy hockey player. I eventually quit the whole thing, telling myself that if I couldn't be the best at something, I might as well not do it at all (a way of thinking that still sticks with me to this day.)

My current interest in the hockey game has nothing to do with faded childhood dreams however. No, you see, it has everything to do with latent civic pride. I can't explain it. I haven't felt a thing such as attachment to a city in the longest of times, yet there's something strangely comforting about the sense of complicity with a large group that something like a home team participating in the Stanley Cup Finals can illicit. As the fuzzy, shadowy players glide across the glitchy, speckled ice, dodging oscillating lines and shifting between monochrome and colorful, I'm filled with a weird sense of excitement. Every goal offers edge of your seat excitement. The Ottawa Senators are leading 5 to 3 as I type this and I couldn't be happier about it.

Of course this is all ephemeral. Hollow, fleeting and base excitement in my otherwise tepid life. Though I can't help but think on a larger scale. What if the Ottawa Senators win the Cup? Will the result be similar to what happened in 1993 in Montreal? Will a large number of angry mobs take to the streets? Will there be rioting, looting, pillaging, plundering, senseless violence, piracy of all kinds, etc... ? If so I'd like to take this moment and volounteer as angry mob leader. I believe that my superior intellect and lukewarm charisma would allow me to rule over groups of senseless yet vindictive fools with an iron fist. No? I've always wanted to lead an angry mob. It's been a dream of mine for almost as long as I've loved cartoons, and that's saying a lot. This story isn't going anywhere. Cartoons suck now. Good night.