Tuesday, January 20, 2009

11:32pm

On the one hand I wish I had more time to sit down and craft really good material for this blog. On the other hand I'm pleased that I have too much else to do.

After spending most of my life in one or another academic environment, it's kind of an unusual feeling to be overwhelmed with work that is entirely of my own construction. When I was in school it wasn't at all uncommon for me to be overloaded by essays and whatnot, usually because I was too lazy or too distracted to get the head starts I really should have on those assignments. Since moving back to Toronto in September I have been pretty lax on myself; giving myself some time to breathe and decompress from the insanity of 2008, but in and around the New Year I found myself getting bored. And bored for me equals madness -- not that good "I'm a crazy artist" kind of madness, either: more the "I am contemplating more and more often, and with greater aesthetic detail, burying a pick axe in someone's head for stealing my seat on the subway" kind of madness.

So here I am, on Obama Day, after spending several hours debating the finer points of political science with a bunch of armchair bureaucrats and half-drunk skate punks, trying to write in a blog to explain why I don't like wasting time.

Music is better than booze, for one thing. Even sitting around plucking away and trying in vain to get down the needling details of Gordon Lightfoot and Leonard Cohen is better than staring vacantly at a TV screen while my ninth drink slips slowly and inexorably toward its final resting place -- overturned on my floor to collect dust and bugs. Or, God forbid, falling prey to the Guitar Hero fanaticism that seems to have gripped my roommate of late. Talk about wasting time.

I feel at this point that I have to run to catch up with myself. I've talked my whole life about doing what I love, all day, every day -- and suddenly, with no real warning whatsoever, it's upon me. I spend my day writing -- what I'm writing doesn't matter, it's enough that I'm manipulating words and weaving rhetoric -- and when I come home I have considerable musical responsibilities to attend to. This is more fulfilling than any girlfriend, paycheque or other external satisfaction has ever been. I am thrilled, happy, grateful.

And, goddamn it, thanks for pointing it out -- yes. I am very much alone. I guess the groupies are a little farther behind trying to catch up with me, and maybe once I get to that point I'll start feeling a little more in touch with humans. But for right now I'm holed up in my head, trying to wring every last morsel of inspiration I can from everyone and everything around me. It doesn't make for terribly reciprocal romantic liaisons, I would imagine -- don't try to love me when I'm in the state I'm in.

I'm going to cram that Guitar Hero up his ass. Love him like a brother, but I'm writing real music here, on an instrument not primarily composed of plastic. Do I feel superior? Yeah. Sue me.

On some level I feel kind of bad posting this kind of nonsense in an online forum -- because some people actually deign to read this stuff, and honestly I'd rather be entertaining you (all three of you). But sometimes I need to get this out of the way so I can get to the music -- like an archaeologist sweeping dirt off a fossil, except I'm more in the leafblower camp than I am in the little-noncy-brush camp.

What? You don't like it, don't read it! I didn't ask you to show up! Get the fuck off my lawn!

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

up for air

God, I gotta tell you. So much of this is fractal bullshit.

It's 12:02am. My alarm clock says 1:02am, because I refuse to fiddle with it twice a year when we have our arbitrary time change; I figure it'll catch up when it catches up. I'm starving myself back into clarity -- I reckon I deserved a couple months' leeway as far as steam-letting went, and now the steam has gone right the fuck back up into my neck where it used to rest, and it's making me severely uncomfortable. I distract myself with stars and streetlights.

I really, really dig the streetcorners in this city. I could just walk from corner to corner all day and especially all night. You think I'm kidding -- go stand on the corner of College and Bathurst on a really cold night, just outside Sneaky Dee's, and watch the drunks trudge by. Or swing down to Queen and Spadina and close your eyes and feel the vibration of bodies looking for something to eat, something to swallow, something to put their teeth in. You truly, truly don't need eyes to see that kind of heat rising in December, let me tell you what. It's palpable -- it's like standing next to a blast furnace. It's awesome, and not in that skater-boy kind of way, either. We could solve the energy crisis if we could determine how to catch libido in a bottle. Put your teeth in it and watch it burn.

But yes. I missed this city. It's a terrible cliche to say it's in my blood or my bones, and my friends never believe me when I talk that way anyway -- they chide me for trying to cover up nine formative years in rural Ontario and walk cool like I was always Here and never There. But I swear to God I never really left. There was always something exciting, something alive about the wild urban versus the mild suburban to me, even as a kid taking his first trips on a subway. I know it sounds romanticized, and it probably is on some level, in that very Lorca "Poet in New York" kind of way, but this ain't New York, so I feel partially liberated from that most supreme of cliches.

Blood runs under these streets, I'm convinced of it. This isn't violence the way you're thinking; this isn't gangs and mobs and bike clubs. It's not cutthroat politics or nightmare jetsetting. It's just blood, you know? Life. The good stuff. The stuff that makes me feel something, now that I kicked myself once again out of another year-long binge. It's like every so often I come up for air, before the next steam ship comes by and rolls me back under again. And every time I come up -- well, this is a lot like treading water, isn't it? I'm not saying anything, I'm not going anywhere particular: I'm describing a moment, treading water under stars and streetlights and distracting myself from my wrongheaded clock.

Yeah, a lot of this is fractal bullshit, but I think tomorrow I'm going to take a subway ride downtown and invest in a magnifying glass, some Super Glue and a couple of mincy little tweezers. See if I can't start putting some of this together -- never know, right?

You people are going to get sick of this shit, really quickly and really soon.
Funny, though, how I still find you inspiring.

Localized Irritant IV: Hey YouTube -- thanks for nothing

Yes indeed, a new year, a new gripe. You'll be seeing more work from me this year, I promise, but in the meantime I have to get the juices flowing again, and I find there's no better lubricant than sheer, unadulterated irritation. Welcome back everyone. Have a seat and adjust your faces.

So I'm reasonably sure, after four months working for a dot-com, that I've seen just about every permutation of YouTube videos featuring people:

a) getting hit with large, cumbersome objects
b) getting hit with small, fast-moving objects
c) getting hit with large, cumbersome and yet fast-moving objects like cars (whoever posted that gem was a little sick)
d) falling down stairs
e) falling off tables (I'm looking at you Scarlett)
f) being pushed off stairs and/or tables
g) getting struck in the nuts by small children (this one's for you guys out there)
h) slipping on banana peels
i) slipping on a buttered floor (my personal favourite this year)
j) otherwise maiming, injuring or damaging themselves, other people nearby, or property

Subjects A-J make me incredibly happy. I'll be the first to admit that pain is hilarious -- and for those of you reading this thinking, "Oh sure, wait till it happens to you"...well, apparently you haven't read any of my other stories. To me, few things are funnier than an unsuspecting younger brother being broadsided by a gigantic exercise ball, or an irritating roommate being pranked into nearly killing himself on a pre-buttered floor. I blame my propensity for this kind of humour on a childhood filled with "Three Stooges" and "Laurel and Hardy" reruns, that taught me physical abuse doesn't actually hurt or have consequences of any kind, but does make for hours of wholesome family entertainment. (At least in my family)

However, during my tenure at my current position, I've also been subjected to the other side of YouTube, the part that makes you break into hives every time you hear the words "user-generated content": I wish I had an appropriate title for these douchebags, but the only way I've heard them described (without epithets attached) are as "YouTubers".

Okay, there are a few entertaining video web logs (vlogs?) that I'll follow if I'm inclined, and one or two are real gems (the McDonalds Millionaire guy is an underrated genius), but the vast, vast, vast, VAST majority of the content on YouTube is as vapid, if not more so, than any text blog you might come across on LiveJournal or...well, Blogger, actually. Seriously, it's bad enough to have to plow through the mountains of blogging horse shit that clog up the internet without having to WATCH it too. I read about somebody's bitchy parents, or somebody's lame attempt at amateur political analysis, or somebody else shamelessly ripping off the work of known comedians, or whatever, and that starts veins pumping in my forehead. But my goodness -- it's a whole new world of rage to actually listen to these mouth-breathers speak...and to watch them is an even greater treat. I find words fail me in instances like this. They should have sent a poet. Or, contrarily, they could have just picked one out of the virtual gutter of weird-looking preteens with ninety facial piercings and a haircut that looks like it was done by Stumpy the one-legged barber (on account of the 45 degree bang-angle) who read garbage like "Twilight" and think it's a fucking documentary. I'll go there another time; that's hate within hate.

I just...I don't understand what prompts these people to share their thoughts with the world. Just because the venue is there does NOT mean you should necessarily utilize it. If you're going to blather your way through some kind of inane, half-formed opinion on Iraq or the current state of music or something (or else jump-cut your video to get rid of the hours of "ums" and "ahs" in between cogent sentences) you should at least think about maybe, I don't know, reading something other than Wikipedia for reference, or better yet, consider NOT SHARING your verbal diarrhea with the rest of the viewing public.

Same goes for all you twelve year olds who have taken it upon yourselves (or had it forced on you) to start playing guitar fifteen seconds after exiting the womb, so you now play like the bastard son of Steve Vai and an M60 machine gun. Okay, you're very good. No, I'm not jealous, but you're very good. And I don't blame you for wanting to share that skill with the world. FIND SOME NEW MATERIAL. If I have to listen to one more of you kids play Canon in D at a zillion miles an hour, or some weak metal shit that could just as easily be done through MIDI for all it sounds like decent melody, or even AC/DC at eighteen hundred times the normal tempo, I'm going to crawl through the screen and ram your Sears-brand shit festival of an axe right up your nubile, pre-teen ass.

And don't even get me started on all these gamer assholes who decide to take a good song (EVERY good song, it seems) that I'm trying to locate so I can learn it without having to download it, and set it to a video of some bullshit World of Warcraft ambush scene or -- worse -- Japanese animation of any make or model. I tried, guys, I really did. Lots of my friends are into anime, and they did everything in their power to find a series I might enjoy. No dice -- it all looks fucking stupid to me, and you're not going to change my mind. So do me a favour and keep your weirdo Full-Metal-Fruit-Basket-Ranma-Mon pseudo-porn away from the music I like. Isn't that the whole point of J-pop as a genre, so you people can learn Japanese empirically by singing along to your favourite theme song from yet another show about children piloting robots? Furthermore, who lets children pilot fifty-foot tall missile-toting death machines anyway?
...I just wrote the follow-up line to that thought six times and erased it six times because I don't want to come off as a total racist, so I'll just say "imagine your own Godzilla joke".

Anyway, I know -- why watch this stuff if it incenses me so much, right? Two reasons. First, it would probably be imprudent and potentially libelous to write about the stuff that's actually pissing me off right now, so I needed a surrogate, and internet losers are a nice, easy target (they don't move too fast on account of the years of immobility leading to muscle atrophy. Oh, and they're all fat, too). And second, like every other internet loser on the planet, if I didn't watch this stuff, I'd never know what to bitch about.

All I'm saying is that, with a little creativity and a little forethought, there could be tons of great "user-generated content" on YouTube, and maybe it would be a community that people would visit for more than just clips of their favourite films or "man-hit-in-genitals" videos. As it is now, it's just a virtual expression of the kind of talentless wasteland our culture has become. YouTubers: you make me very, very sad. And angry. Yeah, that too.

There seems to have been no real point to this post. I'll come up with something better next time.

Oh, and Happy 2009.