I did it all for the Tanooki.

Torpedoes and folk wisdom...

nobody@vox.com(schlimmbesserung) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:09:39 -0400

Picnics! Everybody loves a picnic. Birthday parties, too, and guitars. And many people enjoy wine! Ergo, what better way to celebrate Rebecca's birthday than to bring wine, sammiches, and guitars to High Park and have a picnic? That definitely made for an awesome weekend. High Park is a pretty magical place; it's right in the middle of the city, but it's so lush and quiet that you could altogether forget where you were as long as you don't look south and see the Lakeshore condos peeking over the trees. Also, Toronto seems to have the most docile geese ever; some stupid kid was chasing a dozen of them yesterday, and they actually ran away. If he tried that trick in Waterloo, he'd be lucky to walk away with his eyesight and all of his fingers.

Not too much else is going on. I've been to a few too many goodbye parties for departing coworkers, and I'm fighting a losing battle with my reading list (I just got transferred back upstairs to fiction, and there is so much I want to read. The fiction staff are a terrible influence), but life is still mostly just the steady cycle of work, sleep, visiting friends, and relaxing at the apartment. Not especially blogworthy, but pleasant.

My summer of concert awesomeness just got a little bit less awesome. Inside Out reneged on their tour budget, and it doesn't look like Pain of Salvation or Beardfish will be joining Dream Theater in Toronto this summer. That's two times missing out on seeing PoS in concert now. Bah humbug.

Speaking of Dream Theater, I got their new album, and it's...well, exhausting is the first thing that comes to mind. I still lovelovelove their 1990s/early 2000s material, but my joke about their becoming the Harlem Globetrotters of Metal is becoming sadly true. They've never been a band you listen to for the lyrics, but (with the possible exception of "The Shattered Fortress"; it's hard to fault a guy for finding refuge from alcoholism in writing music) one gets the impression that they've truly stopped giving a shit about the vocal side of their music and are just using it as filler between the mind-bending solos. This, of course, means that the breezy ballads in the middle are ear-bleedingly pedestrian, and the gigantic epic that closes the album also sounds phoned-in. I don't know if the clumsy lunge toward melody is a sign of an aging band that can no longer sustain the polyrhythms and shredding of their glory days, or bullying from their new label, or just an ill-considered change in direction, but it's really not working. There's playing on that album that is up there with their best, but it feels like I bought a wilted salad for the croutons. Time to take some advice from the man whose son they'll be touring with this summer: shut up and play yer guitar.

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Strike, struck, stricken.

nobody@vox.com(schlimmbesserung) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:47:50 -0400

Yes, it's summertime in Toronto, and that means...contract renegotiations. The municipal workers walked out on the weekend, knocking out everything from daycares and summer camps to garbage collection, and the employees of the LCBO (our province's liquor monopoly) are deciding tonight whether to follow suit. I don't know either dispute well enough to pick a side, but it's certainly going to be an interesting summer while those battles rage on. The LCBO across the hall from my till was an utter madhouse today, with flocks of thirsty citizens as well as cart-filling maniacs who I can only hope were bartenders stocking up (how's that for brutal? The LCBO's monopoly is apparently such that even the barkeeps have to go through the government warehouses for imports). Rotting garbage, bored children, and prohibition: possibly a perfect storm.

Summer life trundles along as usual. I read, I rock, I try my best to avoid the latest wave of bookstore office politics. There were hints of summer romance for a while there, but that flamed out spectacularly at a Kensington hipster party that also somehow happened to include no less than three people I knew from Guelph. Ah well.

Next step: computer shopping. My venerable laptop is slowly going terminal (pun intended!), and I'm ridiculously stoked at the idea of a computer on which I can actually record music.

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The Beast of Eden

nobody@vox.com(schlimmbesserung) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:51:24 -0400

800px-Eden_project

So, in the latest anything-can-happen-in-Toronto moment of my life, I wound up on a game show yesterday.

Through a convoluted and deceitful recruiting process I'm actually not allowed to discuss (I signed an NDA and everything), two of my coworkers and I wound up on Cash Cab. I kinda felt bad for our host/driver; apparently most people would recognize the ridiculous disco lights inside the cab, but none of the three of us has cable and we were more confused than anything. We had a pretty fabulous first round, though, only missing one question and accumulating $650 by the time we completed the drive from Cabbagetown to Ossington.

If only things hadn't fallen apart during the finale. Our team captain (or "hero" in the parlance of the show), bolstered by our awesome performance thus far, was seduced by the prospect of a double-or-nothing bonus round, and we were powerless to stop him. The host/driver pulled out a video screen and showed us an image not unlike the one beside this post. "This facility in Cornwall, England houses many international plants and endangered animals, as well as several artificial waterfalls. What is it called?" I could tell you that it's made of geodesic domes, or even that the architect who first used such a thing was R. Buckminster Fuller, but after getting questions on everything from progeria and Erlenmeyer flasks to balsamic vinegar and Lego, nobody in that cab recognized the Eden Project. Easy come, easy go; we left the cab no richer than when we'd hopped aboard.

It wasn't all a loss; apparently the director was so impressed with our display of nerdy camaraderie that she broke a personal rule and came out of the tech truck to talk to us; when she found out we were en route to a coworker's birthday bar night, she pulled $30 out of her purse and insisted that we have a few beers on her. TV people aren't so bad after all, apparently.

In other news, one of my other coworkers might have just done the impossible: gotten me interested in a hip-hop group. They are called Subtle, and they're friggin' fantastic. The reductionist synopsis would be to say it's like Godspeed You! Black Emperor with a bigger backbeat and some rapping, but that'd be totally unfair. Let's just say it's lush and original and quirky and everything the stuff on the radio isn't.

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It's a true story, apparently.

nobody@vox.com(schlimmbesserung) — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:29:38 -0400

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.

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"Bryan Adams is probably a big King Diamond fan."

nobody@vox.com(schlimmbesserung) — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:18:40 -0400

opeth2.jpg

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

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Drop it, in a fashion suggesting that the object in question is of a high temperature.

nobody@vox.com(schlimmbesserung) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:54:50 -0400

One exam down. Oddly enough, it was sweet, sweet candy. Looks like my lucubration paid off.

The last week has been pretty damn fantastic: lots and lots of high culture and shenanigans. I went to the newly-renovated AGO on Wednesday to marvel at all the awesome art (highlights: pre-Raphaelites, a really cool Magritte, and the mind-bendingly intricate wood and ivory carvings on the ground floor), and then to the ROM, where I promptly completely and utterly geeked out over the dinosaurs. No matter how old I get, it's impossible to look at the gigantic Allosaurus and not giggle maniacally. Plus, I was in good company; long-lost Guelphites were in town for both tours, with the usual hilarity ensuing.

Next step: face my pending mortality and turn 23 on Friday. Dammit.

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Hell's bells, it is too sunny to be blogging.

nobody@vox.com(schlimmbesserung) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:57:31 -0400

This weather is stunning. I'm almost ashamed that I took a brief break from my errands day to check my Internets and update things.

Firstly: apparently Vox is being a pooface about transferring my posts over to LJ, so those of you who read me from over there should go back and catch this massive end-of-semester roundup.

Also: the sheer amount of awesome concerts over the next little while is making my bank accounts sad this month. Opeth, Decemberists, and Porcupine Tree (on Sept. 30?! Who the balls puts tickets up five months early, particularly for a seated venue?) are all coming up, and Rotate This! (seriously, fuck Ticketmaster. Go to RT instead. The staff are kind of dicks, but it beats "service fees" the size of fat children) pretty much owns my soul now. Prog Nation (Dream Theater! Pain of Salvation! Zappa! Beardfish! Oh my!) hasn't even been announced yet. It's going to be a loud, loud summer.

Thirdly: I haven't blathered about the awesomeness of a new album for a while, so here's a loud recommendation: Mastodon's Crack The Skye. It's dorkily high-concept in the extreme (astral projection! Rasputin! Assassinations! ~~Bears in ill-fitting hats!~~), but I'm really enjoying their new sound. There's much less random barking in the vocals, and it turns out that the screamer-in-chief has a lovely, resonant, nasal rumble of a voice when he feels like it. I think I might still be too conservative a metalhead to dig their earlier albums (Leviathan is pretty fuckin' badass, but a bit too chaotic for me), but I definitely love this new direction.

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Rocks and chickens and ham and rocks...

nobody@vox.com(schlimmbesserung) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:35:30 -0400

bondage-kewpie.jpg

Good heavens, blog, it's been a while.

Apparently I am now a star of the stage! One of my coworkers is a theatre tech student down at Ryerson, and I got drafted to be her male lead after the original male lead bailed on her. I had to play the ghost of an assholish businessman, contemplating his life's errors in Purgatory while an offstage "stage manager" taunted him. The crowd loved all of the cutesy theatre in-jokes in the script, which was good, as it drew attention away from me being by far the least-schooled actor present that night. Still, I think we did alright, and I hope my colleague gets a good mark for our efforts.
David Mitchell, David Mitchell, David Mitchell! After all that sounding-off about Cloud Atlas, I've now polished off Ghostwritten and most of number9dream, and I think I'm in love. I'm blown away by how he tangles plot threads and changes styles so effortlessly. He's also got a rare gift for writing thriller-style plots without getting all twitchy and breathless, and I love how he takes background characters from his earlier novels and fleshes them out again later (for example, a character in Ghostwritten mentions his troublesome brother in an aside, said brother then becoming the protagonist of one of the Cloud Atlas novellas).
If the rumoured film adaptation of Cloud Atlas happens, I will burn everything. EVERYTHING.
Sushi On Bloor is closed! Goddamn. However (a challenger has arrived!), New Generation, a mere block away, is a worthy successor to the cheap-sushi-in-the-Annex throne. I'm a little scared by some of the specialty maki I saw on the menu; the "Canadian" one with smoked salmon and asparagus is cute, but the unagi-and-cheddar roll is either heresy or an orgasm wrapped in rice. Maybe both.
Things that trip up gaijin like me: apparently "kewpie," when seen on a sushi menu, means Japanese "QP"-brand mayonnaise (combine it with Thai sriracha hot sauce and you get Dynamite Sauce, apparently. Huh). Me, I think of these and cry a little.
I've spent a long time corrupting my friend Rebecca with my musical tastes. This time, she turned the tables and dragged me out to an Ian Thornley concert. We somehow wound up in the very front row at the Phoenix, leaning comfortably on the security barrier. After an opening act so bad that even Mr. Thornley made fun of them (imagine the Clash without talent or chutzpah. Or don't), we were treated to a hell of a show. I mostly just knew the material from his Big Wreck days (Murphy's Law of Brad at a Concert: my favourite BW track, "Ladylike," didn't get played, but at least we got "That Song"), but I wound up enjoying the whole set. Thornley's a talented dude, and he brought a monster of a backing band. Now, if only I could figure out where I've seen his bassist before, I'd be a happy man.
My goodness, the Indigo people sure know how to party. I was invited to "The Ranch" (looks like my old Guelph friends aren't the only ones with a penchant for naming rental homes) for a party on the weekend, and the usual chaos ensued. I love my coworkers even more with their vests off. I fear, however, the house brew. They devised this bastard concoction called "Sip'n'Go," which is a blend of rye, cheap beer, and frozen pink lemonade. Tastes delicious, hits like Holyfield.
Wanna see a gorgeous, clever, dangerously addictive computer game? Go play World of Goo. Any game that can make a grown man cheer because he built a tower out of balls has to be doing something right.

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Wrong side of the sunset again...

nobody@vox.com(schlimmbesserung) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 03:36:05 -0400

So I've been talking with academic types at U of T about what next year is going to look like. Rumblings of a lateral move. Diversifying or altogether changing what I'm going to be doing under the aegis of Toronto. Whatever it takes to reduce the odds of lobbing myself out a fourteenth-floor Robarts window.

Also: everyone go read Cloud Atlas. My friends at MetaFilter wouldn't shut up about it, and I'm beginning to see why.

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Epenthesis and Alabama Cocktails

nobody@vox.com(schlimmbesserung) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:35:42 -0400

alabama_slammer.jpg

I swear my phonology prof was under the influence of something today. That was one hilarious session. In addition to discussing the joys of stress placement algorithms, we also learned about ice cream, the Italian public education system, and Alabama Slammers (orange juice, Southern Comfort, amaretto, and sloe gin, apparently, which sounds like something I should try this summer).

Speaking of booze, yesterday was a terrifying day to be out on the town. I was too busy to take part in the St. Patrick's festivities myself, but I was downtown for just long enough to have to help some lost girls find a subway station, and then on my own ride home to be pelted with flung pamphlets as some drunken asshole had a fit and started throwing things. I felt sorry for police and security folks.

Other things. Um. Watchmen was pretty much what I expected. They nailed the 80s aesthetic super-well, the celebrity "cameos" were pitch-perfect (the opening-credits montage! Wow!), and Snyder's fetishistic devotion to capturing every tiny nerdy detail in the panels (and even adding a few of his own, e.g. Ozymandias' "Boys" folder on the computer) was fantastic. Alan Moore was right, though. The damn thing is unfilmable. The movie was a messy distillation of a much larger work, and I'm not just referring to the ending (which, while actually kinda clever, was still a travesty). I can't imagine how confusing it would have been for those who haven't read the book.

Also, if you haven't seen this yet, you need to. Some Israeli DJ watched thousands of those goddamn Youtube music performance videos (guitar in the bedroom, drums on the porch, trombone recitals, keyboard lessons, singing in the bathroom mirror, etc.) and layered them into some brilliant, brilliant music. My mind was blown.

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