I was certainly more excited about seeing The Clientele at the 2nd Virgin Fest on Toronto Island than the ferry ride over and definitely more enthused to see them than a handful of other bands on the two stage schedule. Despite understanding that The Clientele’s wispy sound would struggle to hold up at a festival I had faith I would swoon to them and their lovely britishness. I did. But I feel like I may have been the only one, and at times I was overly concerned about convincing myself I was enjoying it. During a problem plagued set for a sparse audience it was hard to find any enthusiasm in the crowd and while I enjoyed their sound and the lovely sight of keyboardist Mel Draisey I left without the riveting feeling I expected to be hit with.
The reason I looked forward to the show with annoying enthusiasm (ask those that I dragged with me ) was The Clientele’s latest release, God Save The Clientele. So much of that summer had been played out to the soundtrack of subtle yet complicated guitar, breathy vocals and a mood so specific and complex I lazily resorted to the term ‘academic’ in describing what I was listening to so much. I was taken in completely.
God Save The Clientele is equally too complex and similar throughout to strike the listener through the first few listens. Like predecessor Strange Geometry, Alasdair MacLean’s vocals and guitar work vary so little in sound, key and tone that even what was intended to be drastic shifts in mood such as between opening track Here Comes the Phantom and personal highlight/beautiful moment, Isn’t Life Strange? ends up slipping by without a perking of the ears to a difference; at least at first.
Where The Clientele lose lazy listeners they also draw more in. With each cycle through the 14 tracks and an increasing focus on finding the hooks and standout lyrics (of which there are many, including the serene simpleness of ‘and standing in this garden overgrown / a sense that everything still lies in wait / I see you come moving through laurels tonight’ from No Dreams Last Night) , God Save The Clientele becomes so unique that all the reviews comparing them to 60s pop bands seem entirely off and derivative of each other.
This is not pop. This does not sound like the Monkees. The Clientele create such a dreamy atmosphere, exemplified with the success of a seemingly thrown away track like the spoken The Dance of the Hours that in a way I can see the lumping of them with a genre associated with shimmery beauty – but this is more. Although many tracks, especially These Days Nothing But Sunshine’s chorus can be sung along to, it’s not with jubilation. Sitting in the backseat of a car while a friend drives you away, God Save The Clientele would cause more silent optimistic pondering than attempts at harmony.
This record pulls at the heartstrings even when it doesn’t mean to. Whether it’s the duplicity of a lyric like ‘happiness just comes and goes’ from an upbeat song like Here Comes the Phantom or the biting weariness of Brighton Beach to Santa Monica, smiles that come from God Save The Clientele are of the more lasting kind, the kind that come from figuring out something bigger, better, more personal and lasting than when connecting when you see her face to you becoming a believer.
Describing or even associating the spot on my personal timeline that I am currently marking with the idea of elite athletics is a gross overestimation of ability to hit elbow jumpers in an empty gym and perhaps a delusion that warrants an immediate click through. It is inevitable however, that with the amount of NBA discourse that I surround myself with that I at least passingly compare myself to the men of my taller and more skilled extended family. The drafting of Ricky Rubio, the dreamy Spaniard born in 1990 planted the idea of age as a basis of unnecessary and damaging comparisons of myself to men that hold my attention far more than I hold the attention of any woman. The idea has now bloomed. With the impending doom of another birthday mere days away, I have realized that according to professional League prognosticates I am at my peak and will soon be on the way down the slippery slope to deterioration and feebleness.
One of, if not the only monetary advantage to being an incredibly average white Canadian male instead of a rare and worldly NBA player is that as I age, I am slated and expected to earn more. Allen Iverson settles on a mediocre contract levels and levels below what he once earned while I settle into percentage based yearly increases in my salary. This makes sense. I should have no need to reinvent myself as with experience, I become more apt at my job whereas with age, theoretically Allen becomes worse. The milage on his bones has a more of an impact than any increases in his floor vision and a more advanced understanding of the game. The only resort he is left with is what takes hold of so many aging leaguers: a gradual reinvention that focuses more on fine touches and finesse than toughness, quickness and the athletic gifts that allowed most players to enter the league in the first place. And as we watch Iverson turn the corners on screens and pop jumpers with increased frequency this season (that is, if he touches the ball…I’m looking at you Z-Bo), I wonder if despite earning more as I forge forward in time, there is a gradual reinvention of myself lurking in the sands of time to come like a dirty sarlacc for purposes related more to self preservation and betterment than self serving financial gains.
And to this comes Nicolas Cage. In 1998 I paid to sees City of Angels twice. Two times; once at the theatre and once on a super-sized drive-in screen. I can make excuses and set scenarios in which I don’t appear to be a connoisseur of trite shit, but what’s done is done. More important than my criticism of what was in total a wasted 228 minute is a particular scene near the climax of the film in which a pre-taking-a-tongue-in-the-pooper Meg Ryan rides her bike with the utmost confidence down a hill without a single hand on the handlebars. I admired her confidence (which turned out to be quite false) but mostly I admired her skill. I have never been able to ride a bike without at least one hand steadying my path. My idiosyncratic nature has lead me to remember this scene almost obsessively as prime example of the multitude of things I cannot do. When pondering my age this summer while cycling down an empty Northern Ontario road, I thought of Meg. I then took a hand off the handlebar. Then another. A few seconds later I swerved back to reality but in the fleeting moment of a hands-free accomplishment I felt more than in my prime, I felt that unlike that road I was going up.
If I were attempting to use this incredibly brief and overall quite ineffective moment as proof that like Iverson I am refusing to deteriorate and instead reinventing myself in some way I would be as foolish as a man my age and whiteness trying to mimic Allen’s classic cornrows. Of course this drivel I’m typing exists because I didn’t settle or rest on that brief laurel. Each time I slide onto my seat I continue to pedal forward in my reinvention and although I’m still unable to go more than ten seconds without a jarring jerk towards the curb I am achieving more in a sense of progressing with age than actual cycling aptitude.
As most of my physical being slinks towards midlife with increasing unattractiveness I have at least been able to find an arena to reinvent myself that will also allow me to vanquish the memory of a horrendous film and the accompanying and equally disgusting Goo Goo Dolls ridden soundtrack. If a similarly roundabout set of circumstances and painful memories leads Iverson through his reinvention for the Grizz this year I will be as surprised as I would be to find anyone else that took any worth, strangely complication and seemingly unrelated or not, from City of Angels.
Applying labels to oneself has precisely as much worldly benefit and staying power as applying a temporary tattoo of cartoon Bo Jackson from a Prostars cereal box to your forehead. Avoiding the desire to place myself into any of the number of categories I certainly could belong to with as much gusto as I try to avoid the recollection that I not only once clamored for Prostars but with all preadolescent honesty, convinced myself that they tasted totally different from Alphabits, has landed me nowhere. It still happens. As I age ever so ungraciously and move closer to that theoretic point where uniqueness of personal cultural history begins to slip behind a veiled shroud of similar opaqueness to the thick pile of dust that my Superchunk records may have accumulated at this point not yet reached (and not desired! I’m working, but I‘m not working for you!!!), I find myself still somewhat intrigued by what categories I fit in. Although I have thankfully moved past any premonition to vocalize my own ideas of where I fit in the grand spreadsheet of life, they nonetheless still still exist, with however, one key change.
Gone are the days where a well organized list of extra-curricular activities, rack of albums and recently seen films could be used as the basis for who a person is (as expressed in a one word phrase easily uttered by Mr. Mooney’s secretary). In the place of these more juvenile yet utterly more accessible and probably more meaningful ‘traits’ are more psychoanalytical categories of personality and interaction that until early this week I had not yet labeled myself with
I have been the victim of countless wrong number dials in my life. Growing up with a home phone number one-digit away from that of the only decent theme park in the province I have been apologizing (like a good Canadian boy) for other people’s misunderstandings / wayward fingers (gross) for as long as I can remember. The phone is one thing, as a voice can easily be ascertained as foreign but words, or more specifically, text messages are a horse of a different colour. When confronted at an early morning / late night hour on a Monday with an unknown number and corresponding text, my initial response was not to dole out a sorry with my thumbs but to believe, believe because there was something within that made the possibility of me being the intended target more than a hunch: a label, a label that could be recognized as applicable in a quick moment.
I am under an impression leveled by sheer reality rather than my insecurities and self consciousness that no women has a vested interest in contacting me in a weekend winding down haze at 2 am. Not to say that I wouldn’t flip the switch and make tea (or whatever euphemism that describes a few minutes of awkward conversation followed by silence and then attempts at sex) but I certainly don’t expect it. If however, I were to create a list of situations that could possibly lead to such an event, one theme would prevail as common: I would be relying on attempts at charmingly awkward befuddledness to lure such an invite and never initiating it myself. And here lies the label. What made me believe that I was the intended recipient of the message was that I (or whoever), was referred to as being ’shy.’
After dealing with the initial dismay of the realization that I was slightly flirting with not only an unknown man but the kind of unknown man that would be out at 2am on a Sunday trying to solicit sex from a stranger (what else would explain the wrong number? Clearly there was a Jägerbomb stain over one of the numbers written in lipliner on a napkin) I thought about the label. Could there have been any other adjective that would have made me so wholeheartedly believe that the message was intended for me when all other signs (and uses of annoying short frms like peeps like chu lv to use when crunk) pointed to an errant dial? Would dashing work? Manly? Funny? Spanish? Communist? If they did, I would have to be drunker than I was or it a particularly creatively dramatic mood and have access to Harriet’s Hats.
Does this mean I should put ’shy’ on my business card? Does this mean even if I had business cards I would be so afraid to give them out that I’d end up waiting until everyone had left the lobby and scatter them like Sophie Scholl and run away?
Perhaps when an adjective becomes so entangled with our self-perception that it could take the place of a name there’s a need to step away and examine how like a name tag in a seven year old’s Hanes it became unknowingly sewn in there in the first place. But not now, not here.
If frustration breeds acquiescence, can acquiescence birth guilt? Could this make frustration le grand-père of self reproach? Beyond a convoluted analogy involving Ken Jennings, Foucault and an expired can of chickpeas, could there be a more annoying way to introduce a apologetically excuse ridden post that has been brewing in the keys for months? Perhaps not, but I’ll sure enjoy attempting to make good on what so many enthusiastically drunk frosh students are hoping for this week and try to bring the body up to the standards that the head(er) has set through further use of the obscure reference heavy prose that I wish I was famous for.
I have some explaining to do.
Unlike Mr. Arnez and a Cuban mirror, I will not wave a finger at myself that so easily collected it’s neighbours and curled into a loving club when the camera men took their Lucky Strike break. A self inflicted fist wound is not worth the embarrassment to placate the sense of guilt and abandonment that should have taken the place of not enough beer and existential anxiety as the reason for keeping my eyes focused on a dark ceiling rather than on the back of my eyelids during this prolonged break from my purposeless forum.
What I offer in lieu of physical wounds is a superforkish multi-pronged attempt at outlining why like a young Everlast (and I suppose the original prodigal son) I have returned and what I plan on doing now that I am here.
Some credit for my inability to slink into the cold, cold shadows of the interweb should be tossed upon the social context in which I spent my awkwardly formative early teenage years. Despite Courtney Love’s obvious disdain for his use of the line, Kurt Cobain’s choice to use Hey Hey My My to at least in someway explain his ‘burning out’ has resulted in late twentysomethings such as myself taking a deep rooted, possibly damaging opposition to letting a project grow less and less revenant until it becomes a speck of thought somewhere in the annals of things that should matter. While it’s quite obvious to even the most ardent supporters of my rambling that even hinting at placing what I do here (or have done) in the same postal code of creative projects with Cobain’s work is a grandiose error in understanding my own worth, the basic sentiment behind his inability to become compromised and increasingly derivative is at least one prong of my reasoning for returning to the keys.
As a medium, a blog is stamped, not only with a factual time and date plastered as clearly as the penis sized drywall patch beneath Megan Fox’s headshot on a teenage boy’s wall but with content that grows more and more frustratingly unchanged with each passing click by. Unlike In Utero, which still entertains and offers worth despite remaining exactly the same since 1993, any entry, especially on this garbled mess of a themeless blog becomes less and less interesting, less and less relevant and more and more obviously unable to offer even background, passing entertainment as months pass by without updates. I can admit to reading Salinger’s novellas and Lisa Loeb’s more than once and I’ve taken on Slaughterhouse Five a few times, but who can blame you? You there, Alice Sebold? No. No you can’t. My fossilized content however, does not warrant re-reading.
Placing a novel on a shelf in what can be easily be interpreted as a narcissistic showing-off how of read you are is a move that even the most consciously humble status-free of us still do, yet the caveat to release personal libraries from relation to chest glitter and sleeveless collard shirts is the possibility of utility. It is not impossible to pick a book off the shelf and read it again. People do it. The only reason that women sprinkle flecks of gold on their chesticles is so they will receive leers, the only reason that men pair buttons with triceps is so they feel they look buff and professional and although most of the books people put on their Billy’s will remain there years after the point of purchase is easily recalled, there is still a chance that they are arranged as such for recall. These entries? The same group that has been sitting here for months without change? There’s no way people will recall them and as it’s impossible for them to ‘fade away,’ it could be concluded that they remain here as proof of how great I think I am.
I could have deleted the lot of them. In a divine move, I could have made this place ‘burn out.’ Instead, I have chosen neither. There will be no hightop fades and there will be no drug dealing skid bags that compromise their futures in Grade Ten. I chose to march on.
In an attempt to avoid promises as empty as I wish this bottle of Liberty Ale wasn’t, I will make few and those that I do lay out will be attainable during even my most lurid tantrums of vocab juicing.
1000 words tops. Focus. Music. Film. Roundball and sex. Avoid being square.
Living as long as I have with an ear and an eye leveled to the ground and an overly developed sense of wistfulness and belief in the importance of my own existence, I have experienced a multitude of world changing moments and snapshots in history that when measured on my own scale of importance should at the very least receive a few mintings of ceremonial coins. Although I will always remember coming out of the shower and seeing an airplane hit a building and I can quickly recollect sipping $1 beers while forgetting all I had learned that day as Air Canada hung his elbow on the rim, I now feel on the verge of witnessing an historical event that will dwarf anything I have ever experienced before.
As a child of the 80s, my interaction with the changing face of technology has been as intimate and long running as the relationship between Victor Newman and Nikki Reed. The stark contrast between the hercules monochrome monitor that Pac-Man chomped his way across as I picked Cheerios off my 6 year old face and the shinny new machine that I now type on is greater than the darkest green and whitest white that I could crank up on that honking tube beast. I could type volumes on the magic of making who I assumed was Larry Bird turn black and white and throw down in Double Dribble as an 8-bit experience that I hold dear but it would be all too banal. Like all material things, it’s not the circuit boards within them that you hold to your face and whisper sweet C++ to that create that permanent RAM, it’s the human moments that accompany them that allow a pixilated Larry Legend to become soldered to your own history. As February marches on, we will loose some of that ability as back woods mountain people across North America loose their ability to watch their 4th cousin slide his way out of child support payments on Maury. Analog T.v.broadcasting is over.
Despite now plugging in my channels, the forced amputation of rabbit ears for those that literally ‘tune in,’ is a sad day for me. I feel old enough and culturally aware enough to proclaim that our collective hands feel greased with mid-shower shampoo dropping slipperiness as what is left of the good old days circles around the drain and is sucked away. In the realm of television alone, I have witnessed my parents first discard the radiation king with wood panels, take down the fifty foot antenna from the roof that occasionally picked up Buffalo stations and introduced me to the icons of personal injury law: Cellino & Barnes, erect and then unplug the dish large enough to allow Jodi Foster to make contact and finally, upgrade their more appropriately sized satellite receiver from poor ass regular definition to pore exposing HD. And although I have the cynicism of an elderly gentleman, I am in no position to specifically recall even Happy Days; my expertise dates back to Family Ties. These changes have been staggering, yet until now, I’ve given them as much thought as how to spell Mallory Keaton.
The particular dose of nostalgia that I have been struggling to swallow since first viewing the horror of the public service commercials advertising the end of an the analog broadcasting era is served from a bottle with two names on it: Raymond Babbitt & Toot.
Perhaps it hasn’t dawned on those Jack Donaghy types behind this digital decision but without analog, how could our vintage Watchman’s pick up Wapner as we stroll through casinos in white suits? How can we placate our need to watch Trebek while hitting the highway with the top down? The joy of tuning in my sister’s tiny handheld T.v. and actually finding more than snow will never escape my memory . But now, this jubilation will be impossible to recreate for any eventual offspring that don’t believe that iPods owe a lot more to Dustin Hoffman than one would think. Despite being somewhere in every list of why technology sucks, the idea that new devices make what use to be a journey way too easy needs to be applied to the digital T.v. broadcasting age. The process of moving your handheld set, or for that matter, the rabbit ears, to the perfect spot to grab a faint outline of a figure was simply magic. When coupled with tin foil applied to the ends and a well placed teenager with braces, making the obnoxiously large noses of the Raccoons appear out of flickering black and white dots was a religious experience. Although I currently don’t and probably will never own a handheld T.v. equipped with digital catching ability I can easily guarantee that simply changing a channel won’t convey the apparent legerdemain that Mr.Babbitt was amazed by.
In both saving foods / fixing snaggletooth, as well as in aiding reception, tin foil and braces can only do so much. When acceptance sets in, the bitter Tim Horton’s coffee is usually another Canadian institution: the CBC. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation often wormed it’s way into the lives of us moose hunting igloo lovers through being the only channel strong enough to have reception in the wilderness we settled in and although I didn’t know it at the time, I was better for it.
Spending my summers surrounded by more trees and loons than school friends at the cottage greatly limited my options on the television. Although the lake and forests garnered the black bear’s share of my attention during the day, I was often plumped in front of the boob tube while my mom made breakfast. Being force fed the CBC, I became a fan of a few cartoons that were consistently aired: the homoerotic Rocket Robin Hood and the….ummm….kinda gay, The Mighty Hercules.
I will spare you a foggy recollection of plot lines and minor characters and focus on the strong memory that I have now associated between the technicolour Herc and his mythical sidekicks Newton the centaur & the mute satyr musician Toot and being so wonderfully isolated in the wilderness. I can hear the high pitched Toot playing his pan flute for his brawny friend as easily as I can recall the sound of my mother’s voice calling us to the table to eat our Quaker Maple and Brown Sugar Porridge. If I had the option of flipping through a satellite dish to find a cartoon with at the very least full colour and possibly with a little less topless men (it’s a wonder that I turned out straight), there is no way that years later I could close my eyes and be so quickly whisked back to the days of pajamas and naps. Choice is not always a good thing.
For most North Americans the end of the analog T.v. reception age will usher in the deaths of antennas and the life of DTV receivers with Ben Stein-esque enthusiasm. As the rabbit ears pile up in landfills like a garbage can at a Portuguese bbq, I implore you to take a moment to think of all the good analog T.v. has done, though if you turn the vacuum on, the memories might skip across the screen.
