Ah summer, when a young man's heart turns to...not a heck of a lot. I've been on a bit of a bookstore autopilot, with interludes for lots of reading, occasional drinkin'-with-coworkers hilarity, a random Guelph overnight, and lots of music.
As far as batshit summer projects go, I've been pretty conservative, but there's still lots of fun to be had. I've been working out a bit more, which seems to be giving me a lot more energy and a little more tone. I've also dusted off my "Learn Japanese" book so I can be awkwardly non-fluent in yet another language, and found a nifty kanji-learning program that's letting me type things like 私は学生です and pray that I'm not totally shitting the bed.
The only other thing on the horizon is my (thus-far-in-vain) quest for a second job. I'd love to have some secondary spending money, but the job market is a total mess right now. The whole city is feeling the pinch, and I don't think I'm likely to find much.
Finally: apparently Guelph was featured on King of the Hill on Sunday. The world probably didn't need more anti-Canadian jokes, but the Royal City shoutout is pretty fantastic.
Twenty-three laps around the sun. I'm told that's quite a few. Can't say I made a big deal out of the affair this year, though, on account of still having a bunch of academic shit to get out of the way (culminating in an exam tomorrow at 9am; this entry is a break between this afternoon's toil and this evening's). I cashed in a whole bunch of book karma at the office (they give staff little five-dollar coupons for going Above and Beyond, which is kinda cute, plus anyone who works a shift on their birthday gets a free book), and between that and a recent successful raid on the local used-book store, I have the beginnings of a bitchin' early-summer post-exam reading list.
Stuff I'll Read In May
- David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- Will Self's How the Dead Live
- Chuck Palahniuk's Pygmy
- Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day
This is all variable, of course, depending on the amount of free time I wind up having and how long the books take. A Palahniuk tends to last me two or three hours, while Pynchon, the erudite bastard, is the kind of guy you have to spend a couple of weeks on, within arm's reach of Wikipedia and the OED. Crawling through Mason & Dixon took most of June and part of July 2007, with a few interludes of cheating on him with some lighter reads. It's a rewarding battle, though.
Speaking of rewarding battles, I went to a metal show last night, so it's time for another one of my traditional post-concert blathers.
(a brief culinary foreword: gyros with fries in them are perhaps the perfect I'm-going-to-die-anyway food, and Messini's on the Danforth does them very, very well)
Having eaten our gyros, my noble concert buddy Rebecca and I took the long bus trek from the east end down to the artificial docklands, where the Docks Polson Pier Sound Academy is inexplicably wedged between a dilapidated go-kart track and a few lakeside warehouses. Inside, it's the same shiny venue I remembered from the Muse gig back in 2006, though the crowd this time was a bit fatter and almost uniformly dressed in black. This proved to be troublesome.
The opening band was a "progressive/Viking metal" band from Norway called Enslaved. Not my cup of tea, but I couldn't fault them for not knowing how to work a crowd. Lots of chanting, some sweet riffs, etc. The lesson I should've learned, though, was that the mosh pit that broke out during some of their downtempo bits was a harbinger of the mess that would follow.
About Opeth: in a genre where you can pretty much get a band going as long as you can play three chords and a minor really, really quickly while barking like Cookie Monster with swine flu, they put some art into it. Dynamics! Jazz! I'm generally instantly turned off by any band that does Cookie-Monster-esque death growl vocals, and it took me ages to look past it even for them, but they're a brilliant, brilliant band whose in-it-for-the-music fans probably outnumber the "BWARHARHAR METAL IS LOUD" set. That said, it took less than a minute (i.e. as long as it took for the opening chords of the first song to morph into something up-tempo) for about 75% of the venue to turn into a ridiculous, roiling mosh pit. While Rebecca and I tried to fight our way to the more-stable edges of the venue, she got knocked over, and the next wave of bodies somehow pulled our 300-lbs-combined me-bearhugging-her mass right up off the ground for a while. Things were decidedly better once we made our way to the side, though. Those guys are consummate performers, and the folks bouncing off of each other at the front (even during the acoustic songs! What the hell?!) were missing a hell of a show. Huge crescendos (they turned the end of "Closure" into this crazy wah-soaked roar that had me feeling a lot less guilty about missing the Mogwai show that was happening across town), beautiful fingerpicked interludes, brilliant solos, and, well, yes, a lot of utter racket. Everything was played just as well on the album, but being outside the studio made the quiet bits twice as vulnerable and the loud bits unbelievably brutal.
The legendary Opeth between-song banter didn't disappoint, either. Between leading a "Summer of `69" singalong ("Bryan Adams! He is from here! Are you not proud?") and randomly playing a few bars of Porcupine Tree's "Trains," Mikael Åkerfeldt lived up to his reputation as the silliest, most good-natured metal frontman one could imagine. Choice banter:
- "Beautiful, sunny day here in Toronto! Martin (the drummer) and I went to the arts centre and ate oysters. I hope this does not hurt my metal cred."
- "I once saw the stock photo from that album on a TV ad for PMS. True story."
- "I think I should cut my hair like Geddy Lee's."
- "Tomorrow we're playing a church in Pittsburgh. Right on the fuckin' altar. I am slightly uncomfortable with this."
Setlist
Heir Apparent
Ghost of Perdition
Godhead's Lament
The Leper Affinity
Credence
Hessian Peel
Closure
The Night & The Silent Water
The Lotus Eater
Deliverance
