Never Say Never

Almost exactly two months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Carl of The Impostume fame in a rank Fukuoka nightclub. He'd been kind enough to come see my band on the last night of our tour - a gig that promised to be, and indeed was, a sweaty madhouse with bodies & beer flying around the room. Not only is Fukuoka our bassist's hometown, but it effortlessly lives up to its reputation as a city of hard-drinking yet unreasonably good-looking shit-kickers.

Stumbling offstage a sweaty & smoke-wreathed mess, I joined Carl at the bar for a lively & lengthy chat that meandered from music to trade deficits and everything in between. Since we'd previously only been acquainted as brothers-in-blogdom, it was inevitable we'd wind up talking about life online and, specifically, how so many amateur bloggers are either turning pro or - more often - unplugging completely. Carl was refreshingly upbeat about this cyber-sea change: he felt that the expanse of online existence was helping crush provincial arrogance and petty indignities. "Once people get off their soapbox and take a breath," he said, "they might see that, actually, reality is far more interesting and varied than they might have thought."

 

I'm considerably more cynical about what's driving this shift. The thing that upsets me about the ballooning number of abandoned blogs is that so many smart, sharp voices have been steamrolled into silence by the bleating glibness of microblogging, the Book of Face, Pintrest, tumblr, Twitter, et cetera ad nauseum. It's a tl;dr world and a great many writers who refuse to reduce their ideas to bumper-sticker sloganeering have simply thrown in the towel.

Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't good writers to be found in abundance online. There's Mobutu Sese Seko at Gawker, Glenn Greenwals, Paul Krugman, and Adam Curtis, not to mention the whole of Alternet, Counterpunch and - oh yes - Cracked. But every one of those writers is a reliable shake of the left fist, as essential yet dully predictable as the coffee I sip while reading them. The writers unfettered by assignments or editors, writers with rangy & irregular interests who'd frequently delight, sometimes infuriate, and often surprise me - K-Punk, Ads Without Products, Pere Lebrun's Kasper, Owen, and yes of course Carl too - where have they all gone?



But if I'm so interested in keeping the conversation alive, why haven't I posted a damn thing in over two months? Well, because Carl is right. Every time some rant-worthy outrage would arise (Kony 2012, the coup in Mali, Marine Le Pen, Golden Dawn, HBO's Girls) I'd promise myself a moment to type some appropriate invective... and then life would intercede in all its fluid, multifarious glory and I'd just never get around to it. Gigs, band practice, playing with new microphones, learning a foreign language, perfecting my Italian sausage soup recipe. Reality is indeed interesting and varied.

So why does it still bother me that I've been so absent online? It has something to do with Hipster Runoff - a website that has rapidly degenerated from a once-amusing, affectedly disaffected pomo think-tank into the bastard of Vice magazine and TMZ. The one qualitative buzzword that HRO seems to fret the most over the most is "relevant," and that is precisely what I am guilty of as well. Social media's hyperacceleration of the nanosecond news-cycle means that, between the time that an event occurs and that I finish doing the laundry, the window for pithy au courant commentary has already closed and what I have to contribute is no longer relevant.

But relevant to whom exactly? Who am I trying to impress? What am I missing that I can't elaborate, examine, and enjoy with my friends, my bandmates, my peers, my wife?



Obviously, I need to get the fuck over myself. I should consider myself lucky that anyone outside of my tight little cohort would find anything I have to say interesting. I should also stop kidding myself that this - spewing bile into chasmic indifference of cyberspace - is a priority. That doesn't mean I'm withdrawing exclusively to meatspace. I'm sure, on occasion, something will be so irresistibly aggravating or exhilarating that I'll be compelled back here. Hell, as long as I'm here, the blog's here. Or it will be until some of that unendingly-threatened legislative napalm is dropped on the internet.

But really now: I turn 30 today. I should at least start to consider growing the fuck up.

Déja-Vu Times Two, Part Deux

Could this little ditty, famously used as a daytime soap theme song...



...have been copied from this Italian thriller score?



It's possible: the first tune, "Cotton's Dream", was included in the score for Bless the Beasts and Children, released in August 1971... four months after the release of Una Farfalla Con Le Ali Insanguinate (a.k.a. The Bloodstained Butterfly). Of course, both of these songs inherited their harmonic spine from "(They Long to Be) Close to You". Originally released as a stiffly-performed single in 1963, Bacharach & David's famous ballad is most commonly remembered by the Carpenters' 1970 iteration, with the piano skipping daintily between the suspended-second & major-seventh chords - a motif extremely similar to that employed by the two tunes above.

But really, the sus2-maj7/min7 vamp is just an easy-listening trope in the same way every that "underground" hip-hop album starts with a B-movie or cartoon sample, you can't write a druggy rock song without the I-IV chord progression ("IV", get it?! So clever, those junkies!), and if it's got a Jew's harp it's a Morricone score.

iCame, iSaw, iConquered

Come December, I'll be curious to see whose death ends up earning more year-in-review ink: that of Osama Bin Laden or Steve Jobs. For now, I just feel bad that Bert Jansch was robbed of his last moment in the spotlight.

The only thing I feel about Jobs' sudden passing is surprise at how quickly it followed his resignation as Apple's CEO. Perhaps this is another instance of how intimately entwined are sense of purpose and will to live. Jack Layton, for example, took the New Democratic Party of Canada from a marginal parliamentary presence to the official opposition in a single election and was dead within a couple of months. Even T.E. Lawrence - a man whose feats of endurance & military daring read like pulp fantasy - was scarcely two months into his retirement when he met an ignominious end in a minor traffic accident.

Beyond that pseudo-philosophical chinstroke... so what? Can't say I particularly care. But judged by the online tsunami of farcical grief, I am starkly in the minority. So maudlin & wracked is the tenor of the bereaved I'd have thought that all these people were personal friends of Steve Jobs, that he'd brought them chicken soup on a cold November night, that he'd awarded their kids college scholarships, that he'd given sight to their blinded-by-moonshine great aunt.

But no, they are not a one his friend. They aren't Steve Jobs' acquaintances, they're his customers, his consumers.

Lest we forget that Apple is a corporate behemoth whose liquidity exceeds that of even the world's largest national economy. Lest we forget that Apple is a technocratic Goliath which dodges corporate taxes and whose idea of "healthcare coverage" extends to suicide-prevention nets but barely any further. Unlike his oft-maligned doppleganger, Steve Jobs is not a philanthropist - he's a corporate padrino whose brilliance lies less in innovation than elaboration & refinement - making borrowed ideas better. Apple's very first personal computers (the Lisa and the Macintosh) were little more than liberal imitations of the Xerox Alto. Similarly, Jobs did not invent a GUI platform to (re-)distribute digitized music, but he did figure out how to monetize one.

The true genius of Jobs was his aestheticization of appliances. He transformed utilitarian machines into the fully syntactic symbols of a lifestyle; his public-relations alchemy made technological amenities into elite totems. Between his products & his customers, Jobs fostered not just a relation but a relationship - a transubstantiation presented literally in those anthropomorphic "I'm a Mac" TV ads.

At least the UK got to watch the guys from Peep Show make smug pricks of themselves.

Anyway, this explains why Jobs' death is a big deal beyond the business section. A man like Philo T. Farnsworth arguably had a more revolutionary effect on daily life, but Steve Jobs was a man with whom people felt they had a personal relationship, a friend who had enriched their lives & enabled them to unleash their expressive potential. It's no exaggeration to say Jobs' death has elicited a despair whose scale and substance are equivalent to - perhaps even greater than - the passing of the Pope. Within a mere hour of the news, floral tributes were piling up outside Apple stores the world over. Social media was more choked with endless inspirational quotes than a Deepak Chopra book. The grief was so sensational it would've been considered too stagy for a Broadway musical.

Against this backdrop, the latest essay on Adam Curtis' blog made for some serendipitous reading: in his endless trawl of audio-visual archives, Curtis has managed to trace the evolution of demonstrative emotion on TV. Within barely a generation between the '50s and '70s, spilling one's guts on air went from being anathema - "shameful agony" - to the necessary signifier of human authenticity. This sentimental overflow has become a carved-in-stone commandment not only of broadcast media, but of western social relations in general. However, Curtis warns that this hysterical style of emotional "authenticity" may actually be anything but:

There is a creeping sense of someone pretending to have the emotions that are expected of them. And in this way hiding their true feelings even further below the surface. Or maybe the truth is even more disturbing - that there are lots of things that people live through and experience that they just don't have emotions about.

As irrational psychic ephemera, emotions are difficult to understand and even harder to reproduce convincingly - particularly positive, sympathetic emotions. This is why tearful confessions & expectorating fist-fights became mainstays of daytime television far earlier than the joyful hug-orgies & triumphal backslapping of more recent shows like The Amazing Race or American Idol. So how did gushing exuberance become part of the public's expressive mode? Curtis points to the rise of "self-help" and collaborative craft shows like Trading Spaces and its British counterpart, Changing Rooms:

I think the man that really brought the hug into British television in a big way was the producer Peter Bazalgette. His genius was to spot that the idea of transforming yourself as a person could be intimately linked to transforming the things around you - starting with the rooms in your house.

I think the first real hugs of these kind began in the series Changing Rooms in the mid 90s.

The original revolutionary idea had been that by changing yourself emotionally as a person you would then change society. Bazalgette created an easier and quicker variation. By simply changing the physical things around you - you could then change your inner feelings and became a better and more expressive human being.

Wallpaper as redemption.

Steve Jobs understood this perfectly. By emphasizing his products' artful design, and by casting them as tools of creative composition, Jobs enabled his consumers to feel they were more fully-realized, expressive individuals thanks to him.

What I find disturbing is that, by surrounding themselves with beautiful expensive objects that encourage a melodramatic solipsism, people are encouraged to construct & occupy their own private fantasy wherein the crueler aspects of reality are not allowed. No one wants to feel bad. No one wants to struggle with criticism, dissent, violence, or acrimony. This relentlessly positive self-regard creates the illusion of a cozy but false consensus: by engaging only with the familiar & agreeable, we diminish our ability to cope with difference. Think different, but not so different that it unsettles you.

This is why there is no such thing as a "Dislike" button.

Nothing From Nothing

Deep in the dunes of time, when the first caveman bashed two sticks together in a rhythmic fashion, music was born. When a second caveman bashed two sticks together in a rhythmic fashion, I imagine his tribesmen scoffed derisively, "Eh, that's fine, Grom, but it's just a rehash of Grog's stick-noise, innit?"

Complaining that music has become derivative is as old as music itself - and why not? To one extent or another, all music concedes the influence of its antecedents. But new frontiers of frustration over secondhand sounds have unfolded, thanks to the omnivorous archive of the internet and what Tony Herrington calls "pop culture’s own acquiescence to the illusion of neo-liberal ‘end of history’ propaganda." The latest entry in the derivation debate comes thanks to Simon Reynolds' less-than-flattering profile of L.A.-based content-generators Not Not Fun. There's a lot to unpack in NNF's cherry-picked pastiche, and so several different conversations have developed. Marc Hogan, Mike Barthel, and Eric Harvey have all toyed with the idea of "underground music" as consumer niche (with Harvey in particular refusing the very notion that music can exist external to capitalism). Herrington's blog posts for The Wire have dissected NNF's libidinal affectations. Elsewhere, The Impostume's Carl has pulled back to the broader question of aesthetic mutability, which to me is where the rubber meets the road:

The problem with hybridization of this kind (ie affirmative hybridization: this cool thing plus this cool thing equals new cool thing) is that it misunderstands much of the original hybridizing impulse which was to “correct” the racist or sexist or regressive elements of traditional rock and its representations...

In characterizing progressive hybridization as "corrective," Carl rightly recognizes that musical evolution - like biological evolution - is fundamentally subtractive. Even when music was embellished structurally or timbrally, the motivation was to liberate the art from some hindrance or reactionary element.

Following centuries of parochial tunings plagued by wolves, the establishment of "well temperament" excised tonal anarchy & miscommunication from European music, providing a universal language for composition & performance. Only later, when this system became ossified dogma, did composers begin ridding themselves of its restrictions. And yet in the 1970s, some experimental composers, such as Krzystof Penderecki and Cornelius Cardew, abandoned the avant-garde, suggesting that it "gave one an illusion of universalism" which, as such, could arguably serve imperialism.

Over the twentieth century, music has repeated this adoption-then-abandonment of pedantry in ever-accelerating cycles, yet each oscillation has been an effort to shed the perceived misapplications of the previous generation of music. Bebop, an elitist reaction against the populist sloth of big band, was in turn countered by more meditative & minimalist styles like cool & modal. Meanwhile, rock spent the first thirty years of its life vacillating wildly between extremes of simplicity (e.g. rhythm 'n' blues, punk à la Ramones) and ostentation (e.g. acid rock, progressive rock).

Since the early '80s, the central conversation within anti-authoritarian styles of music (in contradistinction to Pop) has been about "authenticity": is punk better defined stylistically or by D.I.Y. business practices? Has an artist "sold out," regardless of how unconventional their music is, once they sign to a major label? Are music videos an extension or a perversion of an artist's expression? What's real hip-hop? Underlying all of these questions is the subtractive impulse: artistic purity has less to do with aesthetic specifics than with erasing the corruptions inflicted by the culture industry. This is why a debut album is so often considered a given artist's pinnacle, or why so many musicians speak of getting back to a genre's "roots": their sense is that the time elapsed between inception and present has served only to distort or deteriorate.

The subtractive impulse is immaterial because it is just that - an impulse, a motive, an intent. However, the physical means of composing, performing, and reproducing music have multiplied over the years because technology is almost (but not quite) exclusively additive. The toolbox only gets bigger; implements are never discarded, only updated & improved. One generation plows a dirt road across hostile & uncharted terrain; the next speeds effortlessly along an asphalt-paved highway.

Technology has been the engine of every major aesthetic shift, every stylistic warp, every timbral weft. The temporal limits of physical formats first dictated, then liberated conventional song structure. Amplification allowed small ensembles of amateur musicians to become icons. Voltage-controlled oscillators and tape-based effects modules produced physically-impossible sounds. Turntables and samplers turned compositions into instruments, folding music Moebius-style back upon itself. Without barely an exception, any time a new noise has been born, it's been midwifed by machine.

But stop to consider the most recent technological developments: have any of them been appropriate to producing sound, or merely reproducing it? The last great leap forward in music production was non-destructive and non-linear editing, and the shine was already off by the 2001 release of N*Sync's "Pop" single. Most new tools for composers & producers are meant only to emulate older analog equipment minus any of their mechanical failings (or character, for that matter) and with greater ease of use. It seems sadly appropriate to me that the best-selling effects units are looping pedals: contemporary musicians seem more than happy to shackle themselves to endless, high-resolution reiterations of the same.

Meanwhile, the technology with the single greatest impact upon music as an art-form, the internet, offers no new means of crafting sound, no new compositional methods. Its sole capabilities are storage and transmission - not unlike handing a megaphone to everyone inside the world's biggest library.

This presents a real problem to those whose primary exposure to music happens online. In ye olden days, even if you were distant from an artist's immediate context, you could infer something about the artist's politics, class, and sociogeography from the medium via which you were exposed to the band. You'd make radically different assumptions about a band profiled in Touch And Go if they'd instead received a write-up in Rolling Stone. An artist getting airplay on Hot 97 occupies a very different frame than anyone being broadcast by WFMU. But the internet fails to offer even this referential silhouette. Between the infinite interchangeability of blogs and the pandemic speed with which hype feeding-frenzies spread, you often only find a artist after they've become ubiquitous and, thus, utterly divorced of context. All that is visible is the aesthetic surface, delicately draped over a void. Artists like NNF's Amanda Brown, who hybridize other artists' eggshell personae, are building their artistic identities like Russian dolls, each layer a pretty mask atop nullity.

As I said at the open, derivation is a necessary factor in making music. But borrowing another artist's ideas, their politics, their motives, their frustrations & passions at least provides the possibility articulating the same inspiration in a different way. Borrowing another artist's style, their pose, their inflections, their gestures isn't making music - it's acting. And only the most gullible & stupid among the audience ever confuse the actor for the character they're playing.

Ties, Slurs, and Ligatures

Along with appearances by Bono or Thurston Moore, one of the checklist clichés of music documentaries is the breathless pronouncement that "I'd never heard anything like it before." The statement usually comes towards the end of the first act, once all the major players & their backstories have been introduced, and is typically made by someone peripheral or successive to the spotlit artist or scene. It's threadbare hyperbole by now, but bless 'em for having lived in a place or time when it was possible to be genuinely surprised by music.

These days, almost anyone with a music-listening appliance is also sure to have a decent internet connection. There's consequently no excuse to be ignorant: easy access to the full global & historical sweep of music means everyone is now a music nerd. It's merely a question of how much of what kind of nerd you are.

So should there a come a day when filmmakers decide this solipsistically self-documenting culture requires even further exposition, no one will vaguely exalt a song or artist as "unlike anything I'd heard before." Everyone will have their own hand-picked stockpile of ready references & easy similes. Nevermind the ol' Band A = Band B + Band C equation; folks will be busting out algebraic analogies, multiplying influences before subdividing by microgenre.

Of course, the opposite effect could easily result: because the internet allows users to hand-tailor their input, everyone's frame of reference could shrink to a miniscule, self-satisfied speck. Sure, it requires the same minimal effort to drag up a YouTube clip of either some new buzzband or a tried-and-true favourite, but why risk the disappointment that Yuck might kinda be bullshit when I can just listen to "Wings" for the god-knows-nth time? Why struggle to decide if it's morally acceptable to enjoy Odd Future when you can just throw on the Wu-Tang's debut again? The danger of such smug myopia is that there are hordes of nerdier-than-thou jerks (Hi!) ready to school your cul-de-sac ass. Sure, Lostage may be the latest in a long lineage of arena-sized riff merchants, but beware if you're going to "saddle the band with too many overt Page/Plant comparisons." Some snide punk out there will want to know, for real, Led fuckin' Zeppelin is the only goddamned guitar band you can draw a comparison to? What, were you too stoned to take Houses of the Holy off your turntable and investigate Drive Like Jehu, or Universal Order of Armageddon, or, I dunno, any band on Dischord records?

Mercifully, some bands make it easy for lazy critics by wearing their influences so baldly, they don't require multiple citations - it's straight Band A = Band B. (See: Black Lips, Serena Maneesh, The Horrors, etc.) Many Japanese bands actually invite such easy equivalencies. Desperate to broadcast their influences, many musicians borrow a song title for their band name (e.g. Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her, Boris) or vice versa (e.g. Number Girl's "Pixie Dü"); the clever ones quote directly but with deliberate misspellings (e.g. Discharming Man).

Often, the most interesting bands work like Rorschach tests for their listeners' musical knowledge: everyone draws different correlations, based on their personal tastes, without anyone necessarily being inaccurate. For example, a band I used to tour-manage earned sprawling comparisons to DJ Shadow, Radiohead, the Flaming Lips, and Can - all fair assessments to my ears. There were, of course, a few folks suggested jaw-droppingly inaccurate agnates (Helmet? Really?) but that's what happens when drunk Alabamans try their hand at cultural criticism.

My current band's been suited with an even baggier patchwork of musical parallels. No one seems quite sure where to situate us. So far, we've done things strictly D.I.Y. without so much as an official website, yet two weeks ago the drummer from Melt Banana said we "totally sound like a major [label] band." Well, yeah, contrasted with Melt Banana, we do totally sound like a major label band, but that's a seriously relative appraisal - like saying the Melvins sound way more commercial than Napalm Death.

Given Japan's malignant self-perception as rock's farm league, it's high praise for a band to be compared to a foreign act. Not only have we only been identified with overseas acts, we frequently receive the highest praise possible: we don't even sound like a Japanese band* at all! I suspect most people are tempted to make this comment because there's a gaijin on guitar and the lyrics are all in English. That we look & sound comparatively "less Japanese" is less a plaudit than a plain statement of fact.

Anyway, below is a mix of the bands we're most frequently stood alongside - which I find hilariously flattering, with the exceptions of Killing Joke (meh) and perennial underachievers Primal Scream. But I admit, we bear the most consistent likeness to Primal Scream, in that all of our songs sound kinda sorta like Primal Scream. Our vocalist loves Bobby and the bassist digs Mani, so we operate around 20% Primal Scream at all times. The similarity to our other soundalikes varies wildly: one song may split the difference between Shellac and the Birthday Party, the next number might sound like Sonic Youth all over.

Perhaps I should make a "soundalike outlier" mix of all the bands we've been compared to only once, just to see how ludicrous a Venn diagram that draws around our sound. Could we in fact be the middle point between Sleep, Seefeel, and Company Flow? I fucking wish.

Ties, Slurs, and Ligatures

1. Shellac - "My Black Ass"
2. Lungfish - "Jonah"
3. My Bloody Valentine - "Slow"
4. Killing Joke - "Seeing Red"
5. The Jesus Lizard - "Monkey Trick"
6. Primal Scream - "Rise"
7. The Birthday Party - "The Dim Locator"
8. Public Image Ltd. - "Death Disco (Swan Lake)"
9. Sonic Youth - "Death Valley '69"

* - Believe me, I don't consider this praise of any sort, let alone a high honour. The endemic insecurity of many Japanese rock musicians is a sorry state. And what does it mean to "not sound Japanese" anyway?

Everything Back To Norbal

The jaunt to Hokkaido was a pleasant vacation from the past month's mild panic & lingering paranoia. I'd visited the northern isle a few years before, so it wasn't totally unfamiliar territory - just different enough to unclutter the brainspace a bit. I gave myself a few extra days before my band's tour kicked off, so I got to enjoy Hokkaido's panoply of vaguely odd pleasures unhindered by driving schedules or sound-checks. A few old favourites were revisited - the Otaru Music Box Museum, Sapporo's Ramen Alley - but the highlights were stumbled-on surprises that, with the exception of bathing macaques, were of a distinctly unoriental nature: Japan's oldest concrete utility pole and the Lucky Pierrot burger chain! With its Edwardian-cum-Old West sideshow decor and demented half-blind mascot, Lucky Pierrot looks like a frighteningly dodgy proposition - a gastronomic Don Quixote. But I'll be damned if those weren't some of the tastiest, tongue-titillating burgers I've ever had, and for half the price of the mediocre, modestly-sized grub you get in Tokyo.

One burger joint I'd conversely advise against patronizing under any circumstances is Sapporo's Crazy Burger, not the least for its dull dentist-clinic decor. Their menu challenges customers with the 恐怖バーガー (literally "terrible burger") which, by the menu description, is only made daunting by a fish paddy and some extra jalapeño peppers. Accepting their culinary dare, I forked over ¥800 (around $10) only to be told they were out of buns and condiments and so was served two thumb-sized cuts of raw fish, and not just any ol' ichthyoid: Surströmming, officially the most foul-tasting food on earth. I discovered this only after having shoved both measly slices into my mouth. The taste was something like a beached whale carcass covered in cat piss. Or maybe sewer-snake braised in battery acid. I'm not sure. The shock to my digestive track was so rude that my whole physiology forbade the very notion of further ingesting anything more solid than air. My appetite had been raped. I'm just vaguely impressed I didn't vomit.

Much of the conversation on tour - as everywhere else - centered around the triple calamity of March 11. In Hokkaido, the effect has been almost entirely abstract. The tsunami that hit its coast was little more than a large wave. Also, the island operates upon a separate power grid; the dimming of neon facades has been out of solidarity as opposed to necessity. The only tangible impact has been the scarcity of certain items - specifically certain cigarette brands & Heineken beer - thanks to interrupted supply lines.

I suppose much the same is true back in Tokyo. Searching for evidence of the disaster, the devil is only found in the details: certain items are still rationed in supermarkets, gas prices are hiked, and commuter train schedules are bedeviled by rolling blackouts in certain suburbs. But then, if every daily trivium is touched by the catastrophe, that's not exactly an unperturbed normality, is it?

A fair number of those expats who fled during the madness of mid-March have quietly returned. The psychosocial schism isn't nearly as dramatic as, say, the Hollywood blacklisted versus the HUAC informers, but there's still some strain between those who stayed put and those who split. My post criticizing the "byejin" or "flyjin" who left the country ripped open an especially ugly fault-line in our immediate social circle. For my part, I've refused to ask anyone to take sides in the argument, but given the communicative embargo my "nemesis" has imposed against me, it unfortunately looks as though mutual friends will have to orchestrate engagements rather shrewdly to keep us apart.

It's interesting that another friend & I, who've been the most vocal in our censure of fleeing foreigners, are also the most explicitly socialist within our clique. Because of our politics, we likely see the disaster as an ideal situation to reconstitute the social framework of Japan. Never before has there been such an opportunity to forge lasting cooperation & compassion between the native population and the expat community. For all the times we've lamented the insular homogeneity of Japan, this is the moment when solidarity amongst Japanese & gaijin can transform the country into a more inclusive, diverse, and fluidly-identified culture. It's to our dismay & detriment that, instead, the hysteria & self-regard of many expats has pitched them in stark, unflattering contrast to the stoic endurance of the Japanese.

If I could be, for only an hour...

Well, it's Hallowe'en weekend. If you're a foreigner in Tokyo, this means partying hard on the Yamanote train with a bunch of other white people, though in recent years these impromptu costumed hullabaloos have drawn fire from not only embarrassed foreigners but an increasingly strident hard-right. Personally, I'm not particularly bothered. The Yamanote parties are hardly a utopian T.A.Z. and combating xenophobia doesn't begin by dressing up like Borat and acting like a douche; yet it hardly bears complaining that the train transforms into a mobile drunk tank on October 31 - as opposed to any other night.

Of course, people everywhere concoct all manner of fanciful excuse for the explicit purpose of playing the fool in public. Such saturnalia are exhaust valves for the populace's pent-up frustration & compounded stress, which otherwise might be channeled into some kind of radical political expression - and we certainly can't have that! So when Japanese wag their fingers at an American holiday that is little more than culturally-sanctioned juvenile terrorism, lest they forget they spend summertime getting drunk & playing with explosives.

Really, though, to be content with such intermittent tomfoolery is missing the big picture. Just become a musician. Then you can act like a complete asshole 'round the clock and get paid for it!

Then again, musicians are often as discontent to be themselves as anyone else. (Even moreso in some instances.) This is why the musical masquerade of cover songs is impossible to resist. Yes indeed, it makes good P.R. to associate yourself with an established act, not to mention trumpet your own impeccable taste. But no one's ever kicked out a Jimi Hendrix or Stooges cover who didn't want to be Jimi or Iggy (who also wanted little more than to be their respective heroes). Hell, some bands make entire careers out of hollow impersonations of their idols. As an audience, we owe thanks to those talented few who only unveil their influences occasionally & purposefully.

So instead of the usual ghosts 'n' ghoulies Hallowe'en mix (which you can grab here if you really want), here's an amusing selection of musicians playing at being other people. Click on the mix title to download.

In a Stupid-Ass Way

1. Scott Walker - "Jackie"
2. Tricky - "Lyrics of Fury"
3. Teddy and His Patches - "Suzy Creamcheese"
4. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - "I Put a Spell On You"
5. The Fall - "Mr. Pharmacist"
6. The Toreno Brass - "Eleanor Rigby"
7. Sonic Youth - "My New House"
8. The Wooden Glass feat. Billy Wooten - "In the Rain"
9. Melvins - "Going Blind"
10. Dick Hyman - "Green Onions"
11. Shirley Bassey - "Light My Fire"
12. The Chico Magnetic Band - "Crosstown Traffic"
13. La Tia Leonor Y Sus Sobrinos - "Marcha a la Turca"
14. Alex Chilton - "Jumpin' Jack Flash"
15. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Wanted Man"
16. Pavement - "The Classical"
17. Faith No More - "Easy"
18. Martin Denny - "Midnight Cowboy"

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?

Double Je

Here's an anecdote I've been repeating often this week - I can't quite understand why it's been relevant to the various conversations in which it's come up, but funny enough...

A little over two years ago, I was visiting a friend in Lille, a Dutch-flavoured French city near the Belgian border. In the mood for some fine Flemish cooking (yes, there is such a thing), we wound our way down tiny countryside roads to a restaurant that couldn't have been more European: wrought-iron furniture on the patio! Wood & mortar structure! Implements & spoils of the harvest hung cadaverous from the ceiling! Dozens of exquisite ales whose delicate bouquets & subtle flavours swamp together after the fifth pint! Marvelous. I ate my own weight in dairy & meat that night.

Anyway, because this was a building of antiquarian peasant construction, the toilets were out and around the side. (Reassuring that Rule No. 1 has always been "don't shit where you eat.") Circling back towards the front entrance, a young couple passed me on their way out and almost gave themselves whiplash doing a double-take. Slowing their walk to a foot-dragging limp, they began whispering with beehive-loud sibilance, all the while staring back at me. I did my best to ignore them, until the man blurted out Tourettishly, "Kreestov Wil-ahm!"

"Excuse me?" I had no idea what had just been shouted at me. Was this some strange Ch'ti invitation to fisticuffs? "Kreestov Wil-ahm?" he repeated, more hesitantly. The women chimed in: "Aren't you Christophe Willem?"

Ah, a name! Mistaken identity. "No, sorry." They looked unnervingly skeptical. "You're really not Christophe Willem? C'mon, we promise we won't make a fuss. You're him, right?"

Dangerous territory: I looked like someone worth making a fuss over. What kind of fuss? Would I suddenly be set upon by the local S.W.A.T. team, like that unpleasant incident in Seattle? Was I about to get paparazzo'd and then accused of using my likeness to curry undeserved favour? Who the fuck do they think I am?

Keep in mind this entire exchange was taking place in French, adding a veneer of semantic surreality. "Look, I'm just come Canadian guy visiting friends. I don't know who you think I am." The couple deflated, apparently convinced by the nasal vowels of my affected Quebecois accent. "Oh... well, he's this French singer - god, you look just like him! You haven't heard his music?" They broke into an awkward disco stomp, as though arrhythmic caucasian hip-swiveling would make everything clear.

C'est comme ça, qu'est-ce que je peux, c'est comme ça...

I was unmoved.

Back inside, I was still slightly baffled by what had just happened. Taking my seat across from my friends, I waited for a moment's pause in the conversation to ask them: who is Christophe Willem? Their faces blanked as they flicked through their cranial card catalogue. Suddenly the penny dropped, they gasped and pointed at me like a bodysnatcher gone red-alert.

"Putain, c'est étrange!" Evidently, I did very much look like this Christophe Willem chap, a young performer who had won the 2006 French version of Pop Idol and had since become one of the country's biggest stars. Well done indeed.

But I wanted proof that the resemblance was strong enough to turn heads in a random restaurant parking lot. Back at my friend's apartment, we fired up YouTube and searched for the hit single that had been sung at me (yes, at, not "to") by the dancing duo. Ah, there it was - entitled "Double Je", or "Double I" appropriately enough. Let's have a look...

Fucking hell, it's me! Okay, my glasses are round-framed and I don't half-ass the facial hair whenever I stop shaving, but otherwise... The abominable posture, the Pete Townsend beak, the limp-greasy mop of hair, even the ratty-ass military-green hoodie. I am he and he is me and goo goo ga-fucking-joob.

But the son-of-a-bitch sings in a stratospheric falsetto that would make the Bee Gees sound like baritones. Atop shit disco! Goddamn, this was even worse than all those times drunk salarymen in Tokyo pubs called me "Harry Potter." Couldn't I get mistaken for someone cool? Please?

Yes I can. Now that my hair is greying and I've sloughed off any youthful gloss, I'm compared almost exclusively to my favourite Beatle. (George fans, mad respect; everyone else, get stuffed!) Quite nice to be told you resemble one of the great musical revolutionaries of the 20th century - at least far better than resembling either a cotton-candy French twerp or a fictional teenage wizard.

Shortly thereafter, l'affaire Willem inspired one of my better songs of 2008, "Dinner With My Doppleganger". Yes, I realize it's misspelled. Yes, I should proofread my tracklistings before the record goes to press. So be it. Although Willem really only provoked the title; the song itself is more a meditation about my hypothetical "evil twin," whose yin is my yang and whose vice is my virtue, and the disappointment that we'd be more or less indistinguishable from each other. Not that you'd necessarily glean all that from the lyrics. If, however, you can guess the two songs of which this track is a conscious hybrid, congrats, you get a free copy of my latest album. And a cookie.

Mrs. Bronfman Jr.'s New Clothes

On one hand, I'm embarrassed that, a month later, the internet is still aflame with intense detraction & defense of M.I.A. before her new album's even hit the shelves. On the other, the tide has turned in favour of her haters, thanks to Lynn Hirschberg's instantly infamous NYT profile of the pop star. For several thousand joylessly skeptical words, Hirschberg observes M.I.A. play dress-up, self-mythologize, confuse knowledge of with solidarity with, make facile juxtapositions of first-world glamour & third-world aspiration, and repeatedly refer to herself as a "terrorist" in the same blasé tone with which Liam Gallagher discusses his hairdo. It's awkward if marvelously entertaining to witness M.I.A. tar herself as (in Simon Reynolds' words) "bullshit artist of the decade". Even ex-flame/producer/co-cultural appropriator Diplo dog-piles atop Ms. Arulpragasam: "She can’t really make music or art that well."

Hirschberg's first brush with journalistic notoriety came in 1992, with her persona-defining profile of Courtney Love in Vanity Fair. This has prompted M.I.A. boosters to cast the NYT piece as character assassination (slight return), though I'd say Hirschberg specializes in selling her subjects surplus rope. Much has been made of silly ephemera - who bought the truffle fries?! - but possibly dumber than M.I.A.'s own shallow shibboleths is her fans' renewed insistence that we take her seriously as a political artist by, er, not taking seriously her political statements. It's apparently enough that she merely exists as a marble-mouthed fashionista raising her fist, outside the realm of the usual sledgehammer-subtle suspects of "political" art: punkish anarconservatives (Rage), crunchy socialiberatrians (Ani), and earth-mother superfreaks (Badu).

Among the more eloquent defenses of M.I.A. is Mike Barthel's elaboration on her role as "globalism's enfant terrible", but even he falls back on the old canard: "The provocation was itself the point." I'd accept such an excuse when the provocation is transgression of form or process, but with regards to content, shit-talking for the sake of talking shit is doomed to one of several failures:

1. The provocation fails to provoke. Congrats, you're boring.
2. The provocation succeeds, at the expense of banalising the provocative.
3. The provocation succeeds to the point of returning the threat to the provocateur, who stands by the ever-present escape hatch of "not meaning it."

And to that end, through her incessant backpedaling & self-rationalization, M.I.A. has renovated "not meaning it" from emergency exit to a revolving door.

Content cannot eschew politics or meaning; it cannot substitute for itself vacuous beauty. Content without conviction is cowardice, and let's not be so obtuse as to confuse "conviction" with "literal advocacy of". Writing a song about Josef Mengele does not necessarily constitute an endorsement, but there is no way for it to be winkingly void of intent or ideology. Even Genesis motherfuckin' P-Orridge criticized Whitehouse for their commentary-free employ of "extreme"/taboo content. Meanwhile, the only subject for which M.I.A. has consistently stood up is her own ego.

So her politics are pure shin-kicking, the content is symbolically unstable, but evidently we're not meant to "take the statements of someone who has worn pants that light up at face value." This bequeaths M.I.A. the sole purpose of channeling subjectivity. She is a purely aesthetic identity, Barthel argues:

MIA seems interesting to me not so much as a conveyor of rigorously conceived political treatises and moral clarity, but as the vessel for a particular viewpoint that’s largely absent from US culture. ...MIA’s great gift is for aesthetics, and while we’re accustomed to thinking of that as meaningless superficiality, probably the primary reason Americans don’t care about global culture is because its aesthetics are so, well, foreign to us.

After 25 years of Live Aid, enviro-globalism, My Beautiful Laundrette, Youssou N'dour guest spots, and the Sublime Frequencies label, I seriously doubt that many (non-xenophobic) Westerners are unfamiliar with the aesthetics of the third world. What they're unfamiliar with is the political subjectivity of the third world: the poverty, the disease, the instability, the fear. These are affects of which most Americans & Western Europeans have no genuine experience. Even if M.I.A. were more interested in performing as the third-world political subject than goofing on American gangsta-ism, reconstructing such a subject in the first-world would be impossible. She instead prefers some kind of horrid first-generation immigrant buffoonery.

What I particularly enjoy about Barthel's argument, though, is that it comes from a fellow who, just two months ago, wrote the following:

...it’s possible that, in becoming cynical about art’s ability to comment on the wider world, we find ourselves in a situation where the self—identity—is the only source of truth. And as such, those artistic creations considered valuable by any particular individual are the ones that impress that individual—that “speak to me,” as the saying goes. Thus, we find an emphasis on aesthetics and referentiality. ...With culture, you have the totality there before you to examine, and the meaning is constructed rather than manifest. ...Art becomes valued not for its discursive possibilities, but purely for its expressive features.

Well, then... projection of meaning, an insistence upon referring to instead of being referent, and the solipsistic dead-end of identity politics. Yeah, I'm going to agree with Barthel-circa-March on this one.

Why I Won't Live In New York

No, no, no, not this time. Irresistible as it is to swing at fashion victims, dilettantes, subcultural sycophants, narcissists, obsessive self-documentarians, trust-fund-diapered fauxhemians, post-modernist dullards, nostalgia-wracked romantics, obscurantist one-upsmen, and practitioners of a sad, perfunctory hedonism... I'm not doing that today. After all, you can find all manner of these loathsome parasitic specimen in any urban locus larger than 100,000 people. Yes, there are dense concentrations of them in the Big Apple, but where aren't they in the western world now? Baltimore? Winnipeg? Blackpool? Maybe Dundee...

No, I fear what mutation New York would trigger within me over an extended period. Time seems to be unusually cruel towards New Yorkers (especially adoptive ones) who neither succeed nor have the good sense to leave. This spiritual deformity stems partly from the incessant shoulder-bumping between classes. Outside of police states, nowhere else is so little heat generated by the constant friction between the poor & the powerful, thanks to a détente predicated upon two paradoxical conceits:

1. The ruling class are, and shall forever be, the ruling class. Kiss the ring, bitch!
2. The American Dream: any schlub on the street can capitalize on his/her potential to become one of the ruling class. Horatio Alger, suck my dust!

Thus, whether you're looking up or down the socioeconomic ladder, those you see at the other end serve as evidence of these axioms. Of course, both are false and highly corrosive to dignity & compassion. But most pathetic is when someone past the crest of their youth & enthusiasm clings so desperately to the second factoid - someone who never got the brass ring, the corner office, the record deal, the sitcom pitch, the movie rights, the solo exhibition still despondently dry-humping the striated husk of their adolescent ambition because they never realized, as George Carlin did, "it's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." It reminds me, most witheringly, of Armando Iannucci's reality check to the aged & developmentally arrested:

The past is a distant yacht. What you haven't done now, you'll never get done. Possibility is a private party to which you are no longer invited.

You see, over at Ads Without Products, some poor schmuck who happens to share a name with one of British blogdom's most esteemed thinkers felt the need not only to make his own existence known, but to claim dominion over his name in- and outside his own idiom and to request the offending post be removed. Perhaps his argument would have been better made if he hadn't tried crassly to Google-bomb himself, with what appears to be a 10-year-old Russian peasant's grasp of the English language.

(AWP sensibly did not remove the post, especially given that Mark Fisher stumbled upon it five months after the fact.)

This behavior is all too typical of folks over 40 I've met who've tried to take a bite out of the Big Apple and were themselves chewed up & spit out. They ooze a clammy insistence of their own importance, their self-promotional monologues pinballing schizophrenically between their achievements, their (poorly feigned) comfort with obscurity, and David Icke-class theories of how their rivals/corporate America/"the fuckers" have conspired to suffocate their career. They're often depressingly humourless, hyper-sensitive, and pepper their speech with more profanity than a sailor on shore leave. Consequently, they're unreasonably hard to follow in conversation (and even moreso in written missives).

This isn't to say that they haven't produced works worthy of admiration, or that they can be very pleasant & interesting people. But ceaseless nagging by the sad resentment that I never got my due isn't a fate I'd wish on anyone - least of all upon myself.

Speaking of assholes in New York City... allow me to dogpile atop the South Park/Mohammed controversy by basically reiterating what Jon Stewart said last night. If the threats of violence came from some shadowy fundamentalist cabal overseas, okay, Trey Parker & Matt Stone should probably lay aside any planned North African or Middle Eastern excursions, but that's where the danger would end. But these threats came from some baker's-dozen of lunatics based in Manhattan - where, mere miles from Ground Zero, they can praise Bin Laden, celebrate the anniversary of 9/11, and make intimidating pronouncements against South Park because they, the fundamentalist shitbirds, enjoy protection under the First motherfuckin' Amendment. And yet, with the full wrath of a vengeful god behind them, these self-righteous cowards haven't even the strength of their own convictions, offering some mewling mitigation that they were "helpfully" pointing to the historical precedent of Theo Van Gogh to "warn" Parker & Stone.

Quoth Mr. Stewart, to all those who would threaten violence based upon religious or political ideology: Go fuck yourselves. Two times.

Souvenir Part 1: How Nerds Make Enemies

About a month ago, I sat in front of a blank form e-mail in which I was to list my top three tunes of 2009 to submit to the Dandelion Radio Festive Fifty. Three songs. This took over forty minutes and two cups of coffee, but not because it took that long to painstakingly weigh my options; because I couldn't think of three songs worthy of ornamenting a whole year. In the end, I opted for Mos Def's "Auditorium", Pissed Jeans' "False Jesii Part 2", and the Flaming Lips' "Convinced of the Hex" - marvelous songs all, but not especially surprising or brain-expanding.

At any rate, this exercise made it clear I was in no position to write the usual year-end poll. Writers more erudite & curious than myself were reduced to balancing their top 25 lists between hipster-bait and inexcusable trash like the Black Eyed Peas - how the hell could I salvage even a dozen decent tunes from such a desolate musical landscape? Yet what music writer can resist the allure of lists? Mercifully, we'd come to the end of a decade (a milestone which almost escaped me entirely), always a decent (if arbitrary) time to take stock. But I didn't want to fall prey to the backwards-looking pattern which Simon Reynolds has noticed, nor exaggerate my crankier tendencies by echoing Glenn Branca's recent Jeremiad. Instead, I thought I'd take a look at the albums I listened to, not liked, the most over the course of the Aughts.

2000:
Fantômas, Fantômas (a.k.a. Amenaza Al Mundo)
Mr. Bungle, Disco Volante

A decade earlier, I'd been inspired to pick up the guitar in emulation of a kid six years older and many degrees cooler than me; a kid who worshiped the ground on which James Hetfield, Slash, and (whoops) Nuno Bettencourt walked. Consequently, I was the first kid in my elementary school to own Appetite For Destruction and Master of Puppets. By my last year in high school, I still hadn't suffocated my inner metalhead, though having come of age in the "grunge era" had moved me away from sweep-picking & double-kick-drums towards the thunderous sludge of the Melvins.

But my musical world had been shifted seismically by the purchase, out of sheer curiosity, of Frank Zappa's Apostrophe (') on my thirteenth birthday. It defied every rule that Top 40 radio had imposed on my impressionable mind: it was virtuosic but hilarious, it was orchestral but whimsical, it was psychedelic but cynical. Most importantly, it took the piss out of everything terrifying to the young adolescent - religion, sex, love, and bodily dysfunction.

As Tom Waits once said, you can't un-ring a bell. I was forever changed, much to the chagrin of those around me as my mission became to musically mind-fuck everyone in earshot. I forced my first band to cover "Who Needs the Peace Corps?" and would blast the Boredoms' Pop Tatari in the student lounge at school. Then, sometime when I was fifteen, my friend Ben bequeathed most of his cassettes to me before he was shipped off to boarding school. Sorting through the bag, I pulled out a tape on which a puke-green clown grinned ominously at a single lit match. Ben immediately said he was happy to be rid of that particular album and warned me against listening to it. "Imagine dudes who could've gone to Julliard figuring out how to make the scariest music possible," Ben said. "That shit will give you nightmares."

Of course, I threw it on my boombox as I bedded down that night. I ended up listening to all 73 minutes three times and went to school sleepless the next day. This was what I had been searching for, this was the band that I knew had to exist yet had so far been unable to find. Everything I loved about music was contained therein: technical pyrotechnics, whiplash genre-jumping, the funhouse dementia of Danny Elfman's early movie scores, the obsidian evil of the meanest metal riffs, and even the juvenile scatology of those Ween records my friends kept lending me, all wrapped up in circus bunting and bondage masks. This was it.

I spent the next three years amassing every album with any Bungle band member's name on it - Trey Spruance's "solo" outings as Secret Chiefs 3, Trevor Dunn's avant-jazz releases on John Zorn's Tzadik label, and of course the small-but-swelling Ipecac Records catalogue. Ipecac was (and is) the label Mike Patton started to release the projects his Warner Bros. bosses wouldn't touch, the first of which was the inaugural effort by Fantômas, Patton's metal "supergroup" featuring members of Slayer & the Melvins.

By now, Disco Volante had secured its spot as my favourite Bungle record. Its compositional density appealed to my (ahem) maturing ears, and I found its messy experimentalism more intriguing than Mr. Bungle's fussy "pop" swan song, California. But with the exception of the terrifying "Carry Stress In the Jaw", nothing on Disco Volante really "rocked." Though I was still possessed by the urge to throw devil-horns and headbang, I'd become self-conscious enough to lack the conviction required to be a true metalhead. As much as I privately loved "Walk" or "Raining Blood", I found such teeth-gritting machismo, well, ridiculous. I was also sick of getting kicked in the head at live shows.

Enter Fantômas. For kid who liked Marc Ribot and Ministry in equal measure, that album pushed all the right buttons. Gut-rumbling low-end? Check. Pummeling palm-muted riffs? Yep. Gatling gun drum rolls? You bet. Sudden left-turns and defeated expectations? By the bushel. Cartoonish shrieks and sound effects? And how!



It was only later that I realized the extent to which I'd forever be at odds with The Hip because of my fandom for, specifically, Zappa and Patton. The former's modernist & satirical tendencies have somehow left him tarred as "nerdy shit" that is "not expressive", and the latter is one of the most universally reviled performers still alive for reasons I've yet to hear satisfactorily explained.

Who knows. Maybe it's because back in high school, some prick kept blasting "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast" or "Desert Search For Techno Allah" in the student lounge.

Next: Punk & pigfuck enter the picture.

Sojourns in Meatspace

I always wince with a bit of guilt when I look back at this blog and see a scant couple of posts over as many weeks, like some expensive piece of exercise equipment gathering a visible layer of dust in the corner. That is more or less how I treat this site: as a means of streamlining my communicative M.O., of flexing my linguistic muscles, and of occasionally stretching my trains of thought. And just like everyone else's various exercise routines, it's neglected far too often in favour of more "pressing" and "immediate" concerns.

Such excuses are more often than not authentic (though they're excuses nonetheless). Outside of cyberspace, the end of the calendar year is such a Gordian knot of loose ends to be tied before singing "Auld Lang Syne", you'd think I had a legitimate job. Even the friends with whom I spend my cherished downtime ceaselessly needle me about how much I have on my plate:

Are you finished moving? When will the record be done? Have those friends come through town yet? Don't you have practice that day? How much more editing? Do you have an outline yet?

The good news is that it's by & large under control and I predict more-than-satisfactory results, so I'll be able to survey the past year with some satisfaction (in spite of my initial prognosis).

But I'm not entirely sure I can say the same of this blog. Sure, I've contributed a couple of interesting ideas, and I'd like to think I haven't let genuinely shit writing escape into the public sphere, but this site has been relegated to backburner status since I returned to Tokyo. I still enjoy sparring with anonymous antagonists half a world away, and I'll exploit as many outlets for my various projects as possible, but spewing invective online has been at most the third-most-important thing I've done any given day this year.

My banner year in blogging was 2008, when I lived in Hamburg and during which I was the least engaged with my real-world surroundings that I've ever been. This was as much my fault as anything, though that famous Nordische hospitality didn't fucking help. The point is, though, that the number of words I'd type per month exceeded the number of words I'd speak by a factor of perhaps dozens; I'd interact with as many online personas in a single day as flesh-&-blood humans in a week. I was communicating as often, efficiently, and prolifically as ever - the only difference was that I'd moved from meatspace to the electronic aether.

Sorry, did I say "the only difference"? Not quite: I was a goddamn wreck. The further I retreated into my online simulacrum, the more corroded my general mental state became. No matter how extensive the e-mails I'd write or receive, it was no substitute for the sizzle & synchronicity of a good conversation. What I needed was some sustained, resonant harmony among fellow human beings. But my contrary attitude towards my environment made it that much more difficult to engage in the kind of casual conviviality I needed. The horrid Catch-22 of any deleterious, addictive behaviour: the greater the need to be healthy, the harder it is to be so on even a minimal level.

The irony is that, now that I'm back amongst the living, everyone seems to be sinking deeper into the quicksand of cyberspace that I had at my most estranged from reality. Had Twitter been described to me a year ago, I'd have said it was destined to be the Pet Rock or Tamagotchi of Web 2.0, the most self-indulgent of attention-sapping trifles - not the fastest growing social tool on the net, and certainly not Time Magazine's "Person of the Year". Similarly, perhaps the greatest indignation I suffered in Germany was that almost none of my friends bothered to maintain even the most cursory contact. But barely a year later, I take for granted that the most meaningful relay of information I can expect from anyone outside of Tokyo is a Facebook status update. Of course, that I accept the new norm doesn't mean I must do so without bitterness.

I was mulling this over with a friend the other day; he just recently reconnected with the internet after eight-years of online abstinence. Having been without even the slimmest online existence while everyone else expanded their personal brand via MySpace, flickr, Twitter, Blogger, and Facebook, my friend has had to adjust to current cyber-conditions at whiplash pace. Understandably, he's fascinated with how ornate* a "life" somehow external to "reality" can be, and invoked the prophetic words of William S. Burroughs:

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Obviously, Burroughs was thinking more specifically of inner space (of which he considered himself a "cosmonaut"). I doubt ol' Willy B. had enough interest in the objectives of the Apollo missions to have meant outer space, nor do I think he cared enough about computer engineering to have specifcally predicted a communicative network of autonomously-manned machines. But in terms of man's future lying in some ethereal non-space, some subjectively-construed fog free of any realist metrics, Burroughs was absolutely right.

Regrettably, continuing the trend since the first neanderthal spurred sparks from between stones, our technology exceeds our understanding of its potential & power. As thrilled as we are that we can globally broadcast our most menial brainfarts, or watch every imaginable congress of naked people, we don't fully appreciate the danger the internet presents by allowing the from-scratch construction of our own bubble realities. Specifically, we don't appreciate that our online "lives" are pseudorealities predicated upon & filtered by our personal biases, and yet we profess shock, shock! when the bulk of online communication is profane headbutting between bullheaded fusspots who'll never see the other side. We bring our real-world certainty, our empirical surety into the scramble-suited paramnesia of the online "world", in denial that our realist epistemology is inapplicable in such a shape-shifting hallucinoscape.

Reality has always been a hard sell & an even harder purchase, far before the fluidity of the online "world" entered the picture. Most disconcerting is that the internet is the first "netherworld", the first extradimensional space (supplemental to the traditional four dimensions) of which we have direct experience & evidence. For all the talk of tooth fairies & deities, of heaven & hell, of grandparents staring benevolently down from some cloudy resort, no one has even been able proffer a single scrap of evidence thereof. But I know, without doubt or hesitation, that friends with whom I only communicate online exist, since I experience their presence in what can reasonably called a "real" way. Yet, in contemplating these "virtual" friends from my place in the world of bone & blood, I regard them as I regard other friends or family who no longer exist in meatspace: with sadness, with some sense of loss & lack, as "departed" and no longer corporeal. They are phantasmic in a way not dissimilar to the deceased, because their intrusions upon my quotidian existence are equivalently vague, intimated, and memorial. They are not "real" enough.

Or, in the unacademic candor of Mr. Patton Oswalt, "You can replace the Internet with five really smart friends."

(*) - He hesitates, as I do, to use the word "rich".

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.