25 posts tagged “music”
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.
So I met my first cokehead banker yesterday. I opened one of those newfangled tax-free savings accounts (kinda handy! I sure don't see a catch, and neither does my dad's financial advisor, apparently), and the branch manager who took me into the office and did the paperwork had the most obvious over-long pinky nail I've ever seen. Stay classy, Toronto.
Also, I have the biggest Internet crush on this girl here. Quirky, cute, talented, funny. I highly recommend her ukelele-based cover of "Dream a Little Dream of Me," performed in front of her open refrigerator.
Of course, as I develop such geek lust for an online folk singer, my own guitar playing has gone heavier than ever. I spent a couple of hours yesterday learning Opeth tracks, and I've been piecing together a messy riff-fest of my own that's certainly a lot less melodic than what I usually write.
Finally: my phonology professor's Italian accent makes her sound like she's saying "mattresses" instead of "matrices." It's pretty damn adorable.
Possibly the best out-of-context professorial quotation of the year:
"I don't know; I can't really sex a turtle from over here."
On that lovely note, it looks like most of the skull-crushing Fall 2008 semester has come to an end. Most of my classes are done (having lived out their full natural lives, he says, with a sympathetic wince towards York), and the only remaining coursework is a few undergrad exams. The syntactics one tomorrow has me a bit spooked, but the others should be walks in Queen's Park.
Life has been hectic but predictable otherwise. Recession/depression/eschaton aside, it's been a booming holiday season at work, and the holiday season is somehow actually less stressful here than in Guelph. I suspect that a lot of it is the wonderfully drama-free staff; last Thursday, the entire night shift, even the manager (granted, one of the cooler, less ex cathedra managers) went out for post-shift pitchers and had a grand old time. I can't even fathom that happening at my old stores. I also seem to have a new gaming (or at least game-swapping) buddy in one of the new fiction girls; she's lending me Ico after having heard me rave about Shadow of the Colossus; I in turn am introducing her to Fallout.
Speaking of work-related awesomeness, my dearest colleague Vicky's birthday party was also this weekend, and that was absolutely awesome. Engineers, it seems, party like engineers wherever you go, and that pizza-, Wii-, and beer-fueled bash was no exception. My Toronto social network continues to expand, which is always heartening.
In music news, Steven Wilson is still friggin' awesome. I just got his solo album Insurgentes, and my mind is duly blown. Wilson is generally in about five wildly divergent bands at any given time, and it looks like he's taken this opportunity to say "Dude, I'm going to be Porcupine Tree and No-Man and Blackfield and Bass Communion and the Incredible Expanding Mindfuck all at once." Pretty chime-y guitars and random electronic noises and beautiful vocal harmony and horrifying industrial squelches and (hey, why not?) a friggin' koto all feature. He even gets people like Tony Levin and Jordan Rudess to guest-star, and somehow manages to get Rudess to play a reasonable amount of notes per bar (unlike, say, that live "Lazarus" debacle where everyone's favourite keyboard wizard decides to swamp the quietly pretty acoustic ballad with as many cascading arpeggios as he can manage).
Also: apparently I'm in a band again? Besides my honourary membership in the fictional Myspace-only lower-floor-of-Indigo band (every instrumentalist who works in the basement is automatically a member, and "we don't need music! We just are."), I'm now in the world's foremost twin-viola-wielding prog/electronic/alt duo with the encyclopedically-knowledgeable music savant from our store's CD/DVD section. We have between us two violas, four guitars, a banjolele, a pretty sweet synth, two soaring tenors, a small studio setup, and absolutely no idea what we're getting ourself into. We will rule the world. All we need now is a name. Current suggestions tend toward the animal kingdom; he likes Sacred Bovine, whereas I think Ungulate is an inherently funnier way of saying almost the same thing (and almost rhymes with undulate, which might be close to the desired effect of our music). Either way, it's going to be very hard to resist the temptation to give us some heavy metal diacritics. You know you'd listen to a band called Ừñģǔłäŧə.
Thursday was another one of those ridiculous brush-with-fame mayhem days at the bookstore. This one was interesting, if only because our celebrity guest was notable less for his fame than for his staggering influence. I'd only heard of him in passing prior to his arrival, but Canada's own David Foster is apparently a forty-year going concern in the music business, and has been the producer for a ridiculous amount of ginormous pop acts. The guy discovered Céline Dion and Michael Bublé, for crap's sakes (treason, really, but I digress). Funny thing is, despite all the wealth and the glory, he's definitely in the top five for the most down-to-earth A-listers I've met. I find it hard to judge the celebrities' moods on tour; if I had to keep their schedules, I'd probably be surly too. Mr. Foster, though, is my nominee for writing How To Flog Your Products Without Being a Dick. He even brought some random budding songwriter from the signing line over to our piano and gave him a few tips. Hats off, sir.
As an aside, I also got to have a brief chat with Ben Mulroney, who is apparently an old friend of Foster's and was brought in as an interviewer. The man is orange, bright Star Trek orange, but also a really nice guy.
I also finally finished reading the Illuminatus! trilogy today. It's interesting stuff: a solid introduction to the hilarity of Discordianism, a ridiculously far-reaching and entertaining conspiracy satire, but also a weird product of its time. It's amazing how even a late-70s novel feels really dated and odd, though this one in particular was so rooted in the drug culture and wonky politics of its era that it's hard to imagine it any other way. At least now I more fully understand references to Erisian nerddom fnord.
Four days left before my ballyhooed return to the ivory tower. I've martyred my bank account, dialled back my availability at the bookstore, gotten a feel for campus, and laughed off one quasi-threatening email from a professor asking if I was sure I wanted to take her "very difficult" class. Despite all that, I approach the coming year with zanshin and sharpened pencils. I'm excited to be moving forward again. It's going to be a good year.
Highlights of the past few weeks:
- I've been getting a lot of shifts in the music section lately. This is more fun than I can comprehend. Picking the store's music is a blast, as is talking music with the customers, and pretty much everyone seems to be happy to have me there. Here's hoping I can continue this trend.
- I had a pretty awesome visit to Guelph. What was going to be a standard paperwork run led to busking, surprise hangouts with all kinds of characters, and crashing on the last couch I ever thought I'd crash on. My spiritual hometown gets weirder and better every time I come back.
- On that note, I am now completely in love with hollowbody electric guitars. Sustain and heavy-gauge strings are my friends.
- Does anybody else remember Moist? I swear, I hadn't thought about that band for at least a decade, but "Breathe" came up on somebody's iTunes at a party, and I still remembered every word. Frickin' awesome song.
- One of my coworkers called me "quite good-looking" after a shift this week. Uh-oh?
- God help me, I've gotten hooked on jazz music now. After having heard some of John McLaughlin's Indian jazz-fusion work when I did a project on Carnatic music back at Guelph, I decided to look up the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and from there, wound up lost in Miles Davis and John Coltrane. How the hell did I miss this stuff? I knew they were brilliant, but it's about time I experienced it.
- Rebecca came up to visit me this week! Hooray! We mostly just walked around a lot, cooked delicious quiche, watched some movies, and played Soul Calibur in my basement, but hey. It was glorious to see her again, especially since the next time will probably be the Three/Alpha Galates concert at the end of the month.
- Speaking of ridiculously complicated academic twists on lowbrow media, I've started reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Eco is quite the interesting character. He's a semiotician by trade, so even though the plot (so far, anyway) is pretty standard thriller fare, the text and dialogue are so full of obscure references (particularly Italian historical footnotes and the occult), I find myself turning to Wikipedia once every few pages to get the full gist of a joke. That said, some of the banter between his main characters (a trio of occult-book publishers) is downright hilarious, and this is a much more interesting look at all the Grail/Templar/Rosicrucian stuff than anything Dan Brown has ever done.
So I nabbed the apartment. For whatever reason, I won the references war, and I now have a gorgeous little basement lair on the Gerrard streetcar line, in the heart of Little India.
Here's a number that hurts my head: by the end of this month, I'll have burned over $100 on Greyhound tickets to and from Toronto by the time all of this shit is sorted out. Friday ought to be the last trip; I've got a date with the landlord to sign the lease and cheques, and a transfer interview at the Indigo in the Eaton Centre.
Speaking of spending, I picked up the new Muse live DVD yesterday. What a friggin' entertaining show. I can't believe how much of a disparity in popularity they have between Europe and North America. Here, they play dive nightclubs and airport hangars, whereas this DVD had them doing a ridiculously fancy arena show at New Wembley. Then again, some of those poor kids in the back were half a kilometre from the band. I'll stick to my sketchy club shows.
Also: pappadums can be bought dried in the grocery store, and they come to life with just a little hot oil? Why was I not infomed? Homemade Indian food just got that much better. Yummy.
Signs of spring: there was a spider crawling down my wall as I woke up this morning. It was a nice bit of poetic justice (maybe even irony?) that the only object handy for arachnicide was my beat-up copy of Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory.
After the student union meeting tonight (free pizza! Moreso if their usual trend continues and they don't make quorum), I have to meet with my English group and put the finishing touches on our paper on the evolution of the double negative. When was the last time you had a paper that quoted Chaucer, Mencken, Fowler's usage guide, Fabio, Pink Floyd, and Homer Simpson?
Also: I'm never buying Martin guitar strings again. Harumph.
So apparently the Pope took it upon himself to move St. Patrick's Day this year, as you apparently can't have a saintly feast day during the week before Easter. It happened in 1940 and won't happen again until 2060, but hey. Good for the pope! It's nice to see a bit of ex cathedra rulemongering that isn't killing the poor or oppressing anybody. I think he just wants to make sure he can knock back a pint of scary-ass black beer without feeling guilty.
Last night was the last night for this year's Curtain Call musical at Guelph, and I figured that I had to see at least one of those things before I graduated. This year's play was Zombie Prom. What a gloriously weird musical. Imagine Grease with John Travolta dying a horrible death and coming back as a singing, dancing zombie. My good friend Nathan is officially my hero for bringing the house down with his portrayal of a benevolent-but-sleazy news baron, and everyone else was spot-on too. Since it was the final performance, there were more than a few risqué pranks, but that only added to it. I definitely need to see more musicals.
Finally, here's my latest musical "oh, neat!": YOAV. He's like some kind of strange bastard child of Justin Timberlake and Kaki King; he plays really nifty, intricate dance-pop using only an acoustic guitar and some kind of loop station. Actually, I don't think I've ever had such a good week for CD reviews in the Ontarion. I took three and had glowing reviews for all of them.
I swear, I should just become a sociologist of the Bullring (or at least start charging them for the free advertising). Today's amusing sights include a quartet of retirement-age women with a daunting amount of pilsner bottles at their table, and a very metro guy I saw at the bar last night, passed out on a couch in a puddle of his own drool.
Now that I've got a way to record my guitar directly to my computer, I've possibly been spending a bit too much time building crazyass soundscapes. My lack of a vocal microphone and a bass limits things a bit (I'm doing entirely without the former for now and replicating the latter using an embarrassingly-farty pitch-shift effect), not to mention the fact that I'm using programmed drums (sorry!), but it's a hell of a lot of fun so far, and a great creative outlet for stress; a better vent than reading and much more constructive than goofing around with my SNES emulator. Actually, since Vox can apparently host small audio files, there's a good chance that a Mogwai-ish tangle of riffs I'm working on (tentatively titled "Seven Bricks for Seven Windows") might be coming soon to a schlimmbesserung.vox.com near you. The biggest problem right now is waiting for my guitar chops to catch up with the songs I write in my head.
Jen and I went out to the Albion last night for an evening of dancing and revelry. Sadly, the strange and mythical force that unleashes my dancing skills was not in attendance last night (not manic enough? Not drunk enough? Incompatible dancing partners? Not being much of a techno fan? Who knows?), but fun was still had. I hadn't seen some of those people in a long time, and I owed it to myself to see the Gosh Damn kids DJing at least once. Besides, the "Eye of the Tiger" dance-off was hilarious enough to make it all worth it.
End-of-Semester Bestiary (mostly to remind myself)
- 25-page SOC*4310 paper on high school dropout rates: 5/25 done
- 10-part SOAN*4230 portfolio: 2/10 done
- GERM*3530 presentation: Nada
- ENGL*3080 group project: Nada
My goodness, the GTA was a blast this weekend. Lunch with Sonia was a wonderful little gossipfest once we escaped the frightening arctic winds, and crashing at Laura's place was a symphony of junk food and Grammy-heckling (my goodness, Amy Winehouse has an amazing voice, but no stage presence). Then it was off to Toronto proper to go hang out with the Random House people and score some free books. The swag pile was a bit lean on stuff I'd read, but I still got some nifty books, and a few more coming in the mail (new Chuck! YES).
Sadly, my trivia team's lose-by-one-point curse seems to be holding steady. Curse our inferior knowledge of 80's power ballads and college basketball.
Also, here's an awesome street sign I saw on a hardware store on the side of the Hamilton mountain: "Need a good screw? We've got you covered."
