Adieu to the Bon Jack

A sad day for Canada as the country loses its finest politician & a genuinely decent human being aside: rest in peace, Jack Layton.

Meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi: still not fucking dead. Where indeed is the justice in this cockamamie punchline of a world.

Hiding In Plane Sight

The second I go off the grid, several new holes erupt in civilization's creaky, buckled hull. A delusional white supremacist single-handedly shell-shocks Norway; England explodes; and Malawi - my parents' current place of residence - takes a big, bloody stride towards becoming yet another penny-ante despotism. And to think my greatest personal concern for the past three weeks has been a single sickly bat fluttering about the rafters of a drafty cabin in rural Nova Scotia.

I'm going to have to work overtime upon my return to Tokyo to tap out appropriate responses to all of the above (not to mention my recent take-down of John Maus has unexpected renewed relevance and could benefit from further examination). For now, though, it's 1:14am in Vancouver and my wife is pleading with me to turn out the lights, so I'll leave you with an ornery screed I sent a friend from within the grey bowels of the San Francisco airport...

Well, instead of an 8-hour layover in your fair local airport, our inbound flight was 3 hours late and consequently we're stuck in the terminal without any open amenities or services and - because this is fucking California - nowhere to smoke. Fer chrissakes, if I could either smoke or get a cup of coffee, I wouldn't be one wry comment away from a Chris Benoit-class air-rage episode.

At least there's free wi-fi, so I thought I'd wax insomniac a bit about the flight into San Francisco tonight. Good god, it was sold-out economy cabin of living clichés. You'd couldn't have written a harder-stereotyped cross-section of the Bay Area populace. Towards the front of the cabin was a twentysomething black dude reppin' Oakland a bit too hard; also, the long-suffering wife of some Silicon Valley luminary was struggling to corral a newborn & a vaguely bratty toddler. (How do I know she was married to a tech-head? Who else would put an iPod on her infant, an iPad in the hands of a 4-year-old, and not stop talking ever on her fucking iPhone?) In front of me where two late-'30s first-time parents percolating with excessive pride in their bulge-eyed free-range baby which made disturbingly animalistic noises and was mostly charming until he shat himself with an hour left in the flight.

I was sat next to a young Russian blonde who was reading a book titled Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? and, despite being on the chapter about "Managing Social Distance", totally blanked me the whole flight. She had a mole like an anti-melanoma PSA behind her right shoulder. Two rows behind were a couple who weren't really a couple, having just met each other in the departure lounge, and broadcast the arc of their burgeoning flirt-friendship in loud, smug conversation. She actually hissed at the TV screens during the welcome message from United's new CEO, before going on at length about (despite "not really being into nationalism") responsibly representing her country & her gender during her Peace Corps stint in southern Ghana. He reciprocated with anecdotes of his time in Beijing. He was wearing these glasses. By the time the plane had landed, the two had moved on to lovingly (if critically) describing their parents and talking about their "really, like, totally healthy" relationship with their mother's French lesbian partner.

Currently sat amongst a planeful of furious passengers awaiting their connection to Dallas-Ft. Worth. I'm going in search of coffee somewhere in this Dantean mezzanine.

Meanwhile, to the North...

Goddamn it, Canada. I thought we'd come so far. I thought, after over a century of defining ourselves negatively against our noisy neighbours to the south, we'd crafted a distinct & sovereign sense of national self. After all, our elephantine bedmate has been neither a "friendly and even-tempered" beast nor an honourable example to follow.

But no, evidently Canada wants to mirror its adjacent nation, bisecting into a fiercely polarized country whose vocal majority is composed of pigheaded reactionaries terrified of taxes. As in America, the political timbre is being tuned by retrogressive, provincial rubes. So New Brunswick, southern Ontario, Saskatchewan, and especially my fellow Albertans, I hail you in the resonant words of Mr. BDR: nation of motherfucking crackers.

However, there is a considerably bright silver lining to this otherwise dismal election: the New Democratic Party has vaulted from a modest Parliamentary presence to the official opposition. Instead of the ruling right-wingers being opposed by a bunch of milquetoast militarist corporate apologists (cf. American Democrats), they will face a socially progressive, communally-minded party with dedicated nationwide support. The mind reels pondering what hysterical smears American news organizations will chuck at the NDP, given that the American "left" falls somewhere around the middle of the Canadian political spectrum. I can already imagine fat-assed whoremonger Dick Morris calling Jack Layton a "Trotskyite."

But despite their greatest electoral gain ever, the NDP does not have an easy road ahead. This has been the wildest toss-up in Parliament's composition since 1993, wherein Chrétien swept the country, the separatist Bloc Québécois became the official opposition, and the ruling Progressive Conservatives - who once held the largest majority in Canadian history - were nuked out of existence. Today's electoral shake-up is equally shocking, especially with the NDP wiping out the Bloc. The problem is that, between the Conservative's new majority and the collapse of the Liberal Party, Layton has comparatively less influence in Parliament than during the previous minority government. Not only will he have to fight harder to rebuff the Conservatives' mandate, Layton's hard-won prominence is entirely dependent on the notoriously fickle & self-interested Quebec. If he fails to satisfy "les chialeux qui font rien," the NDP's new gains could be nullified the next time around.

But reelection schemes be damned, all that matters now is oppugning Stephen Harper, that beady-eyed oligarchic android who bleeds oil. I would like to return to Canada someday, and I'd prefer it not to have been transfigured into a snowy, sparsely-populated counterfeit of the United States. I left that country for a goddamned reason.

Don't Call It a Comeback

I get why The Arcade Fire are popular. Compositional adequacy; stylized histrionics; ethnic unaesthetization (read: being really white); vapidly populist gestures; arena-ready shout-along choruses. They're the beige middle point at which everyone's Venn diagram intersects, appealing in the same way that McDonald's french fries are: a very convincing facsimile of an enjoyable, nourishing experience that in fact is slowly rotting you from the inside out.

To put it mildly, I've always fucking hated The Arcade Fire. They're responsible for much of what I find repugnant & regressive about the state of contemporary "indie" music. Aside from legitimating the thin-windpiped kicked-turkey warble as a singing style, The Funeral as a subcultural Damascene moment cemented the supremacy of emotive peacockery & sartorial savvy over composition & ingenuity. Obviously, that's not to say the display of genuine emotion in music is bad full-stop; almost any audience would elect honest expression over clinical technique. But really meaning it is a tired Get Out Of Jail Free card for people without anything to say musically. It also drops the bar to such limbo-champion lows that, compared to The Arcade Fire's oikish anthems, middlebrow avant-pseuds like The Dirty Projectors can legitimately be called "progressive" or "daring".

Fer chrissakes, The Arcade Fire's new album is called, and about, The Suburbs - sociocultural territory so well-trodden (by everyone from Jonathan Richman and Penelope Spheeris to Eric Bogosian and The Kids In The Hall) that it needs to be repaved. In fact, bashing suburbia for its well-to-do WASPiness is so tired a trope that it's no longer even accurate: America's suburbs are in fact becoming more ethically diverse and poorer than its metropolitan centres.

(And I presume The Arcade Fire are indeed talking about North American suburbs, given that bourgeois sprawl peppered with above-ground pools and Buicks never really appeared anywhere else.)

None of this has stopped the greater part of the music press from wetting themselves in excitement over the new album. I should've put money on the predication I made to some friends that Pitchfork - who over the years have invested a considerable amount of their brand authority in The Arcade Fire - would give The Suburbs "nothing less than an 8.3 but no more than an 8.9!" Where's a bookie when you need one?

I find consolation in the somewhat-muted grumblings of fellow naysayers like Mike Barthel, who expertly skewered The Arcade Fire's disproportionate sense of struggle against repression:

The insistence among large swaths of the voting public that they are in some vague way oppressed is one of the cancers of American politics, and the fact that this music meant for the emotional state of a high school sophomore has resonated so widely is incredibly depressing.

A number of people have said Barthel is taking the record too literally, sung as it is "from the persepective" of suburban-dwelling teens. This, however, assumes that it's fine for teenagers growing up in relatively problem-free (if somewhat sterile) environments to be self-pitying little shits who privilege their own measly inconveniences over the actual problems of far-less-fortunate people whom they scarcely - if ever - encounter.

And if indeed The Suburbs is the ventriloquised ennui of adolescents, isn't it a bit sad, or disturbing, or both that a band of adults identifies so intimately with such unripened narcissism?

S.S.D.D.

A couple of friends have remarked that, noise-peddling in Manchester aside, I've been mute on the G20 riots that recently blighted my onetime domicile. Well, late to the punditry party, it hardly bares rephrasing & rehashing what more incisive commentators like Dennis Perrin have already said: charred police cars & smashed storefronts make great headlines, but so what? Nothing was accomplished. Protesters polite enough to play by the state's rules were treated like Perdue chickens; what little transgressive potential they possessed was deftly redirected from world leaders at local police, whilst the mayor et al. congratulated the protesters on courteously exercising their freedom of expression.

Meanwhile, the Black Bloc reconvened for their annual bar-b-q and private-property-piñata party, accomplishing little beyond offering Hipster Runoff another chance to bite the hand that feeds it. But I'm sure the cops were thrilled that they got to use tear gas for the first time in Toronto's history! Hell, had a streetcar been burned, they might have even gotten to roll out one o' them newfangled LRADs. Cheer up, lads, Caribana is just around the corner!

Assuming the Black Bloc isn't by now comprised entirely of agents provocateur, they need to come to grips with how flaccid & ineffectual their tactics are. It might be a fun form of anti-capital primal scream therapy, but not only does it give the authorities a chance to hone their containment techniques, it provides blowhard reactionaries with demonstrable evidence that suppression of protest ought to be even more draconian - all while effectively failing to challenge the status quo. If the self-identified avant-garde of anti-globalism can't even muster half the imagination of fictional Hollywood anarchists, why shouldn't the "protest movement" be carrot-and-sticked into the margins like the intemperate children they are?

The Black Bloc is an adolescent shadow of Ye Olde Leftist Militants (e.g. the Weather Underground) who function solely as a bullet-point on why local police departments deserve bigger budgets. Enough of this cutesy Baader-Meinhof roleplay. If we can't yet devise protest techniques that destabilize as opposed to counterbalance & buttress global power, then let's at least act as if we can.

Re-up: Nothing Says Patriotism Like Screaming Like an Idiot

Recently, word from back west came that CBC Radio 2 was hosting a li'l something called the Great Canadian Song Quest, a listener-commissioned swing for the bleachers of immortalising some classically Canuck minutiae in song...

...kinda like what I did four months ago.



Now, I myself am not eligible for the GCSQ: the specific sights/smells/experiences to be enshrined in sound are first voted upon by the public, and then a handful of established Canadian musicians will write the tunes about the elected subjects. The roster of redoubtable artists include everyone from Hawksley Workman & Martha Wainwright to Sloan & Joel Plaskett, so no wonder my phone never rang.

Certainly, the Song Quest is full of noble intent: it's a bit embarrassing that the closest Canada comes to a self-celebratory anthem is the domestic-only hit "At the 100th Meridian" or, uh, "YYZ". Perhaps our famed modesty (at least compared to our noisy neighbours to the south) prohibits us from getting overly patriotic. But hell, if you want to run with the big dogs, your bark has to be as loud as theirs. If you want to compete with "I Love L.A." or "La Marseillaise", then you can't be shy about ceremonialising cultural ephemera or even bloodthirsty jingoism. If you want cops singing your song at wakes for their brothers-in-arms, you've got to aim bigger than bagels and go for heart-rending abstraction like the Pogues did with "Body of an American".

Which is why I spent two-and-a-half minutes hollering like a drunk at the Calgary Stampede about such True Northern staples as Mounties, Trudeau, and (of course) Tim Horton's. Damn the torpedoes! Show some love for the donuts!

For those of y'all interested who haven't already, you can download "A Hesitant Pride" as part of the Breeds With Anything EP for free over at SVC Records.

Four for 4th

Sorry I've been silent this week - it's been spent maddeningly clawing my way up the learning curve on some new gadgetry. Proliferating grey hairs aside, the good news is the recent caffeine-fueled screaming matches with compressors & MOTU have yielded something reasonably exciting that's just about to be let off the leash... Not to mention a fresh batch of hatorade is being cooked up.

AYMFY: awkwardly rockin' decade-old slang since '05!

In the meantime, all y'all Yankee types enjoy the pretty explosions. I can't begrudge your nation completely, far from it really, as the Constitution is (yawningly, yes) an incredible document, and the gubbamint was kind enough to allow me residence for nine years. (Seven of those legally!)









And in the interest of wishing my own people a belated joyous Canada Day...

Make Your Own Kind of Music

Ah ha well... as the yuletide finally rolled out, that glorious maritime weather barricaded me indoors. So I've been slogging around online, ingesting way more year-end ruminations than can possibly be healthy, let alone lead to a coherent understanding of the preceding twelve months. Which, by the way, has fuckin' flown by, though in media res felt unaccountably protracted thanks to the 24-hour news cycle's epistemological equivalent of Chinese water torture.

Not here to wax chronological, though. The eminent Simon Reynolds did the legwork of aggregating a cross-section of lists (cheers!) that betrayed both an ever-more-frayed fringe and a grudging congestion around the middlebrow. This certainly echoes my own concerns about continued subcultural splintering: on the one hand, there will be innumerable bands with, like, two dedicated (and viciously proprietary) fans; on the other, the only bands that garner even lukewarm widespread support will be charmingly uninventive. The hope is that, as the B(ands)P(er)I(nch) of the landscape increases, previous loners & drifters will eventually cluster into larger alliances - like stray hairs tangling into dust bunnies, or a handful of galactic neighbours ballooning into superclusters.

But for all the stylistic dissemination and cred-leveling that the internet affords, the musical world has not become an aesthetically omnivorous, polyglot utopia. Certainly, there are more artists than ever experimenting with sounds not native to their respective locales, and genre-specific supremacy is now boderline sociopathic as opposed to the norm. But at the same time, many year-end lists revealed a retreat to a kind of nation-based cultural essentialism - a sonic self-stereotyping. Best Of lists by Brits looked British when stood alongside, say, a typically solipsistic Yankee list or a counterproductively modest Canuck list. Music critics, professional and amateur, were painting comically unflattering self-portraits in the broad, typecast-tinted brushstrokes of hackneyed political cartoons.

So, in what might as well be "Explaining Us to Each Other, Part 2", let's examine how various countries are presenting themselves via critical & cultural consensus...

England (as seen from street level)


Yooouh'll NEEEEEH-VAAAAH waaalk uh-loooone... (smashes bottle over own head)

England (as seen from the ivory tower)


Grey, morose, melancholy dripping from our upturned nose, saddled by history in a way that arouses a misplaced pride, and routinely confusing "irony" with "anomie" - bloody right we're English!

Germany

We're basically the same as the *ahem* nobler classes of England, though unencumbered by something so base as a sense of humour...

...except on the occasions when we remember we have no aesthetic emergency brake, nor ironic safety net. We know not what we do, for our sense of guilt has been directed elsewhere.

Japan

We will bludgeon your every natural human impulse with gaudy trashionista glitz and five-year-old-on-amphetamine spaziness (with just a dash of uncomfortably unkosher sexuality) until you've been smelted into a goddamn robot. Have a nice day!

The United States of America

Yeah, 911 is a joke, and so is Rodney King, bitch. Grinding my considerable virtues into vice, 'cuz muthafucka, I'm ill, not sick. Wait, what the fuck is going on?

Canada

Hey there! I'm not just some anonymously boring dude in a winter coat: I'm a critically-lauded career musician who nevertheless comes fifth behind a bunch of Americans in year-end polls in my own country and is totally unheard of beyond our borders. Would you like fries with that?

Explaining Us to Each Other, Part 1-A

Yesterday, ads without products did such a marvelous bit of bicultural translation that I'm jacking it to expand and franchise. I'll be skipping the first contrast (about the availability of alcohol at family Christmas festivals) because the English shindigs are knock-offs of the spirit-soaked German Weihnachtsmarkt, and the Japanese don't really have Christmas festivals - y'know, what with the whole not-being-a-Christian-nation thing. I'll compensate by adding a new comparative criterion at the end. Allons-y!

1. Canadians are baffled and intimidated by these:

Germans are baffled and intimidated by these:

Everyone except the Japanese is baffled and intimidated by these:


2. On a crowded subway train at rush hour in Toronto, person B steps on person A’s toe or bumps person A thoughtlessly with his heavy computer bag. Person A casually remarks, "Geez, ya think with all the fuckin' fare they're havin' us pay, the TTC could buy some bigger trains, eh?" Person B replies with a familiar grin and chuckles, "Yah, you said it, buddy," because - by social mandate - Canadians are too polite to get into shouting matches on the subway. That's what Americans do.

On a crowded subway train at rush hour in Hamburg, person B steps on person A’s toe or bumps person A thoughtlessly with his heavy computer bag. Person A does nothing but glance icily at person B because - by social mandate - to publicly display any more emotion than an Easter Island head is a sign of human weakness and, thus, defeat.

On a crowded subway train at rush hour in Tokyo, person B steps on person A’s toe or bumps person A thoughtlessly with his heavy computer bag. Person A says nothing, though his ribcage is likely being compressed to the size of a soup can, because - by social mandate - the nail that sticks out is hammered down. In fact, person A feels meagerly grateful that he wasn't additionally kicked in the shins or elbowed in the gut. Meanwhile, the faint musk of gin & guilt is wafting up from under person B's collar.

3. In any ER across Canada, a young man enters with two of his front teeth missing - a consequence of the questionable tradition of combining cheap alcohol, ice skates, and adrenaline-charged men armed with sticks.

In any ER across Germany, a young man enters with tear-gas poisoning and a smattering of bruises - a consequence of the questionable tradition of combining cheap alcohol, riot cops, and inflammatory rhetoric with a theoretical basis flimsier than a B-52 built from balsa wood.

In any ER across Japan, a young man enters with second-degree burns and singed hair - a consequence of the questionable tradition of combining cheap alcohol and rocket-propelled explosives.

O Canada!

Last year, I spent the day of my nation's birth strolling semi-aimlessly around my former Toronto stomping grounds. The graffitti had changed, most of the old haunts remained, and my convulsively (in)viable old employers finally shuttered its doors for good. It was refreshing to breathe some of that (fairly pungent) southern Ontarian air again.

This year, I'll be dining on leftover birthday cake, taking a few online quizzes (19 of 20! Damn you, William Lyon Mackenzie King!), and cruising YouTube for clips from Kids In the Hall, but in my perennial quest to prove that there's more to Canadian music than Bryan Adams and Avril Lavigne...

The Constantines

I still get goosebumps recalling when I saw their inaugural Lee's Palace performace. They've yet to match their end-to-end burner of a debut, but can still outrock the rest.

Death From Above 1979

Yeah, I called them "Polite-ning Bolt" too, but let's face it: they planted a lot of greasy, scuzzerific seeds that are still only starting to flower.

The Sebutones (no relation)

Oh, shit, Canadians do hip-hop too? As anyone who bugged out over that last Cadence Weapon record will tell you: yeah. And a lot of it's pretty damned good, too.

The Tragically Hip

Trad pub-rock though they may be (with the notable exception of Day For Night's dark, earthy psychedelia), Gordon Downie is the poet laureate of Canadiana. Thanks again - and always - to my Dad for taking me to see them in some Baltimore dive when I was thirteen.

Rush

Yeah, you knew this was coming. Suck it. This rocks.

Hang on a minute - did I really manage to make some kind of a Canuck Top 5 that utterly omitted Montreal? Don't think that wasn't intentional. I mean, I love that city as much as anyone but... c'mon.

Goin' Out West Where They Appreciate Me...

The bitch of it is this photo was taken in June, man...

As I've explained ad nauseum, being an immigrant in Japan is an exercise in Otherness. In a country so homogenous, there's no need to emphasize your foreign-ness; your very presence is enough. Living in Germany, on the other hand, that I'm not German is a constant source of surprise and (often) frustration to those I encounter. An English friend remarked, "To be fair, you do look kind of Kraut-like... and the moustache certainly doesn't help."

In fact, the moustache is one manifestation of an ongoing self-delineation. My unemployability does little to imbue a sense of stability. Moreover, the language barrier has created enough friction that aroused my ugliest knee-jerk rebelliousness. As a result, I've been revisiting my redneck roots. It began with re-watching Twin Peaks on loop over last summer. This extended into an odd preoccupation with old rockabilly and Rocky Mountain-region stoner rock records. Then came the moustache and, finally, obsessive consumption of North American Gothic cinema and sounds.

Mercifully, now I have a chance to flush this odd identity crisis out before I start carrying around a gun and drawling monosyllabically. I'm off to the chilly climes of my native Alberta, home of the new black gold rush. There are few better places than the vacuous Canadian prairies to clear one's head. Hopefully I'll come back revitalized, remembering why I'm grateful I ain't a grain farmer, and without this damned moustache.

Click on the mix title to download.

The Occidental Tourist

1. Tom Waits - "Goin' Out West" (00:00)
2. The Constantines - "Arizona" (03:18)
3. Gordon Downie - "Canada Geese" (07:31)
4. Meredith Monk and Robert Een - "Long Shadows I" (9:50)
5. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Night of the Lotus Eaters" (12:03)
6. Lungfish - "Constellations" (16:45)
7. Duane Eddy - "Rebel Walk" (18:21)
8. Tomahawk - "Narcosis" (20:32)
9. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - "Rachel" (23:01)
10. The Kills - "Kissy Kissy" (25:25)
11. The Billy Nayer Show - "Shaving" (30:26)
12. The Tragically Hip - "Locked In the Trunk of a Car" (32:10)
13. The Fall - "Guide Me Soft" (36:40)
14. The Desert Sessions feat. PJ Harvey - "Crawl Home" (38:54)
15. The Jesus Lizard - "Then Comes Dudley" (41:51)
16. Earth - "Rise To Glory" (46:10)
17. Wall of VooDoo - "Call of the West" (51:52)