Four things about last week:
1. I'm now a credited actor? My editor at the Ontarion also makes short films, and he inexplicably chose me out of all of his friends to play one Elroy "Beater" Richardson, a rather nerdy and scatterbrained drumming prodigy. Make sure you go check out Adam Donaldson's Spooky Kids when it drops next spring. The other actors are awesome, especially Mike E as our super-sleazy agent/promoter, Max ("just Max.").
2. Apparently I'm something of a natural at the drums myself. I had two songs under my belt by the end of filming, just enough to drum really badly on camera for a while (why on earth am I the only one in that movie playing an instrument on screen? And why is it the drums?).
3. When we were trying to find our movie set in Cambridge, we found the best-named Vietnamese restaurant ever: Phở Shizzle. You can't make this kind of thing up, folks.
4. I'm done my Christmas shopping! Hurrah! I'm already in the mall enough while selling books to the masses.
I don't dream often, or at least I don't remember much. This week has just been trippy, though. Monday night was an X-rated scene at my old high school, and Tuesday brought me back to the Gigantour concert in 2005, except Megadeth had decided to play "Mairzy Doats." Ladies and gentlemen, what the fuck?
London, Ontario is such a very strange town. The place is permanently stuck in the 1980s, all run-down brick and sleek lettering. There are some cute used bookstores, though, and some great restaurants, and I'm really impressed with how efficient the bus system seems to be.
The nightlife, though. Ugh. Every bar is just like Trapper's, minus the redeeming Guelph ratio, and the shawarma and fries were a gross tactical error.
Oh well. It was still an epic weekend with a good friend. Now, back to the grindstone.
I come to you live from behind the cash desk at the bookstore. Today, for the first time in a while, I'm balanced. Sleeping right, eating right, caught up on my homework: life is good.
This is always an interesting time of year to be working. I had a great chat yesterday with a war vet who just about had a fit when he recognized his old battleship on the cover of one of the books we had on display. Damn, did he ever have some crazy stories.
We've also just put up the store Christmas holiday tree up. While it looks lovely, it feels way the hell too early to have that thing looming over our heads. My usual marker for the Holiday season is the American Thanksgiving, and that's still weeks away. For comic value, though, I've heard no less than ten people say that the tree topper Head Office sent us looks like a giant silver buttplug. There's a certain metaphorical value there.
Mr. Good has done it again. What a great show.
I saw Matt Good at River Run Centre last night. River Run Centre is definitely a classier place than I'm used to for rock shows, but that's okay! They have comfy seats and a lovely fog machine.
The open act was Dala, two girls with acoustic guitars who were way the hell more country-folk than anything I'd normally listen to, but were so damn talented that I didn't care. I haven't heard such tight harmony in a long time, and the between-song banter was bloody hilarious. Their set closer was randomly awesome, too: a smouldering a capella rendition of "Hit the Road, Jack."
Mr. Good himself was looking tired but dapper tonight, clad in a suit jacket and a striped shirt. He covered all the bases: most of the new album ("Champions of Nothing" is amazing live), the acoustic classics ("Avalanche" for the second time in my life! Huzzah!), and a few unlikely old tunes reworked ("Load Me Up" was better than I expected). Somehow, despite everything working against him (bronchitis, heavy doses of medication, and at least three glasses of wine consumed over the course of the night), he was at the top of his game. "Suburbia" and "The Fine Art of Falling Apart" damn near made me cry, for various reasons. He was in quite the comical mood, too. Between ranting about Canadian Tire (the guy in their commercials should watch his back, apparently), talking baseball, and treating us to excerpts from his imaginary "next album" about the inter-character romantic tension in Lord of the Rings, the stand-up was sometimes just as good as the music.
Approximate Setlist
Girl Wedged Under the Front of a Firebird
Champions of Nothing
Avalanche
Born Losers
I’m A Window
99% of Us is Failure
Suburbia
Silent Army in the Trees
Black Helicopter
Alert Status Red
She's In It For The Money
Load Me Up
Strange Days
Tripoli
Apparitions
Advertising on Police Cars
Hopeless
Pledge of Allegiance
The Fine Art of Falling Apart
There was no way on Earth that this concert could have been bad, but Steve Wilson and Porcupine Tree exceeded all expectations.
The venue for the night was the Phoenix, which, from the outside, looks like an awning stuck on the side of a mental ward (I'm not even kidding. It is adjoined to the St. Michael's Teaching Hospital's Mental Health Centre on Sherbourne). Inside, though, it's actually a pretty neat little venue. There might have been 1000 people in there, and it was cozy, but not nearly as crowded as, say, the last time I saw Muse. The crowd was mostly a bunch of shaggy music nerds and metalheads, but I'd rather have that than the packs of moshing teenagers.
Even the opening band was a pleasant surprise! They were "3," a five-piece from Woodstock, NY. I have no idea how the hell to describe these guys. They have two drummers (one of whom looks suspiciously like he was borrowed from the Blue Man Group). Their singer has about three octaves of range and plays flamenco riffs on a Les Paul. Their lead guitarist plays a Bich 10-string, wears a housecoat on stage, shreds like a motherfucker, and has a giant fan on his pedalboard so his hair blows in the wind. Need I say more? They were friggin' insane. Heavy, melodic, and very talented. They played for over an hour, which would have infuriated me from a lesser opening band (e.g. anybody I've ever seen before Dream Theater), but I was spellbound. All the better that they're in talks with Dream Theater and Opeth to open for their joint summer tour. Oh, and Rebecca says their bassist is cute.
But that's not even what we were there for! 3's setdown was one of the fastest disassemblies I've seen at a concert, and then Porcupine Tree took the stage. Steven Wilson is a man possessed, and a hell of a nice guy. In between bouts of insane musical talent, he bantered with the audience, shared stories about hanging out with ("what's the word for somebody from this town? Torontite? Torontonian?") Alex Lifeson, and made fun of the frowny hipster guy in the front row ("awwwww, look at you smiling like that!"). And the music! Good heavens. They sound even better live than on CD, and I couldn't have asked for a much better setlist. Their older, more psychedelic stuff was downright hypnotic, and the heavier stuff was brutal and haunting. "Anaesthetize" was a kick in the face, and I was definitely one of the idiots singing along to "Open Car" and "Halo." I didn't even recognize a few of the songs, which were apparently B-sides from the last album, but even those were amazing (seriously, it takes giant balls to start your show with a song nobody in the room knows. Then again, it takes more balls to play a place like that barefoot).
When the band's bus is parked on the street right outside the venue, is it possible to resist waiting to say hi? We certainly couldn't. Neither Rebecca nor I brought anything to get signed, but Rebecca decided that the book in her purse (a cheapo mass-market printing of Measure for Measure) was the best we could do in that regard. Of course, she was too starstruck to go get it signed herself (probably understandable considering that it was her first "celebrity encounter," but I'll still never let her live it down), so it was up to me to elbow my way into the crowd of fans at the bus door, make a wisecrack along the lines of "not having any of your CDs on hand, I bring you one of your country's lesser art forms," laugh as he replied with "let me tell you, I wish I could take credit for that one," and give the book back to the silly, swooning girl. The dude is tiny! Using KJ for comparison (just a little bit taller, and the same wiry build, though he lacks the sexy curves), I bet I've got about fifty pounds on him. That can't be healthy. Nice guy, though, and apparently comfortable enough in his emaciation that Rebecca has a gigantic crush on him (which I'll never, ever let her live down). If they find my broken body in the Speed River this week, the probable cause is one joke too many about Rebecca and Steven, sittin' in a tree.
3 Setlist
The Word is Born of Flame
The End is Begun
Alien Angel
Battle Cry
My Divided Falling
All That Remains
These Iron Bones
The Last Day
Bramfatura
Drum Duet/Jam
Amaze Disgrace
Porcupine Tree Setlist
What Happens Now?
Fear of a Blank Planet (complete with creepy-ass music video)
Sound of Muzak
Lazarus (weirdest-looking acoustic guitar I've seen in a while)
Cheating the Polygraph
Anaesthetize (with gratuitous strobelight action)
Open Car (never has there been louder crowd-singing)
Dark Matter
Blackest Eyes
Mellotron Scratch
A Smart Kid
Way Out of Here
Sleep Together (very angry and uptempo, with creepy video)
----------------
Even Less
Halo (could barely hear the bass, didn't care. Made my night)
Today the wheels of democracy turned and turned. As wheels often do, they almost ran me over.
Nomadic student that I am, I don't seem to receive such luxuries as election cards. We have ways around this, though! I diligently gathered my identification (two forms of photo ID and my lease as proof of residence in Guelph) and strutted down the road to Titler Public School (half a kilometre from my door!), where the Elections Canada website said I'd be able to vote.
As luck would have it, I arrived at recess time. Batallions of tag-playing prepubescents parted like Moses' bad hair day as your scruffy twentysomething correspondent hopped their fence (if there was a gate somewhere, I couldn't see it) and followed the maze of yellow signs to the gymnasium. Two affable white-collar guys pored over the paperwork, looked up at me, and chirped in unison: "You're at the wrong polling station." No, dear reader, thanks to a remarkable feat of gerrymandering, my polling station is not the one two blocks from my house, but rather one deep in the bowels of the Ward, the old Italian factory neighbourhood that now doubles as industrial wasteland and student ghetto.
On I went, then, umbrella held high, squinting into the frigid wind, until I found myself facing the splendour of the Italian-Canadian Club, one of the many diasporic party halls that dot the city. In the tricolour-bedecked main room, a legless war veteran on a piano bench gave me a "when I was your age, I was shooting Krauts" glare and scrutinized my ID. Sadly, my landlord's Parkinson's-tinged penmanship wasn't legible enough for the old warrior's eyes. That meant additional paperwork, more flashing of ID, and solemnly swearing an oath, under pain of imprisonment, that I wasn't lying. Finally, I got my two little ballots, placed my two little x's, and went on my merry way.
Tonight? Wanking away at CBC.ca and watching the results pour in. This will be an interesting one.
- I've almost started writing my thesis. By this I mean that there's a solid working outline, and I've taken a nice chunk out of the mile-thick reading list. I might just do this thing after all.
- Course selection is starting soon. It figures that I had to fight and fight to find four interesting courses to take this semester, but the winter (my grand finale) offers no less than seven things I'd like to take.
- KJ and I tried playing The Sims 2 when I visited her in Waterloo this week. She fussed over the decoration of the house. I spent most of my time trying to get our Sims to have sex. This pretty much sums up our relationship.
- This is pretty much the best concert month ever. As if Porcupine Tree (rides be damned. We'll sleep in a church if we have to) and Matt Good weren't enough, 5th Projekt are playing a free show at the Albion (four blocks from my house!) on the 9th. Who are they, you ask? I grabbed their CD from the reviewers' slush pile at the Ontarion last year, and it's one of two times in history that I've given a full five stars. I cannot miss this.
- Oddly enough, I think I'm more consumed by the University Bubble now than when I lived in res. It's Oktoberfest? Thanksgiving is tomorrow? There's an election on Wednesday? I know all these things, but it doesn't seem quite real.
Things that are happening over here lately:
- I have a gigantic musical crush on Steve Wilson from Porcupine Tree.
- I have a two-papers-a-day habit as I search for relevant thesis information. Thank goodness that I don't have to do much with the Dead White Guys. The downside to that, of course, is that there's a lot of shitty, self-serving modern academia to wade through.
- I'm reading the new Doug Coupland and having lots of fun so far. The whole real-life-corporation-as-setting gimmick is kinda strange, but I think I'm mostly jealous that it's a Staples and not Chapters-Indigo being spoofed. Somebody's got to write a big-bookstore satire, dammit, and I'm too busy to do it myself.
- Despite our most obtuse pop culture references to date and better-than-ever pre-game banter, our bar trivia team has yet to win a round this year. Damn.
- The semester is already almost a quarter done. Good heavens.
Three days in, I'm pretty damn confident that this is going to be a good semester.
German certainly isn't the class I was expecting, mainly because the singing and dancing one-man show we call Waldemar has apparently fallen ill. Thus we have Herr Doktor Müller and Frau Doktor Meyer taking turns substituting. Both seem pretty cool so far, thankfully, but we're still doing beginning-of-semester review.
Comparative Stylistics with Dr. Thomas rocks too. He's the same manic, creepy old Frenchman I loved in first year, and I can thankfully follow his lightning-speed heavy accent. I only worry that he's going to follow through on his legend and shank us all on the assignments.
Bakker's semiotics seminar is hilarious and interesting. He's in his usual habit of flying all over the place and covering fifty topics at once, but I'm sure it'll fall together eventually. It usually does.
The only uncertain element: my thesis. Bakker is definitely on board as my advisor, but bureaucracy seems to be moving at its usual glacial pace. Considering that it needs to be a paper the size of a bus by April, I really want to get cracking on this.
